Orchestrating the service encounter in a digital era: How the presence of a greeting online service agent affects customers' experience of visiting a home electronics e-store

Abstract: The service encounter is to an increasing extent being transported to an online context. Companies are more and more often trying to create an initial point of contact when a customer enters a website. Using the S-O-R framework as a theoretical starting point, this quantitative experimental study tries to measure the impact of this interaction between a greeting service agent and a customer in the context of a home electronic company's website. The study employs a between-subject design, where subjects were randomly assigned to one of three different stimuli, each simulating a website visit: (1) a named greeting service agent that is introduced in a more emotive and informal manner with an accompanying human avatar picture (2) a greeting service agent that is introduced as a chatbot in a formal and less emotive manner with an anonymous avatar picture and a non-human name (3) absence of a greeting service agent. Results show that the mere presence of a greeting service agent, regardless of if it is indicated that the agent is a real person or a bot, did not generate higher levels of pleasure, trust, social presence or intentions to continue browsing the website. However, a linear regression analysis showed that social presence, as a separated variable, significantly predicted pleasure and trust which in turn, acting as mediators, significantly predicted purchase intention.