Bot or not : A customer’s perspective of customer service chatbots and human customer service representatives in E-commerce

Abstract: Chatbots are increasing in popularity, both as a valuable tool for commercial purposes but also as an area of academic research. It has been successfully applied in multiple application areas such as healthcare, education, customer service and work support. Despite the successful use and application of chatbots research has identified two main user experience challenges: technical- and hedonistic limitations. Users also have a hard time understanding what level of competence and functionality they can expect from a chatbot. To combat these challenges, further research is needed to understand the user adoption and perception of chatbots. This study aims to research both the experiences and usage of customer service chatbots but also explore what preferences customers have when it comes to interacting with customer service chatbots or human customer service representatives in e-commerce. The theoretical technology acceptance model called Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was applied for this study. A quantitative study comparing customer service chatbots versus human customer service representatives was performed by conducting a questionnaire. The results from the questionnaire indicated that the participants of the study in general rated human customer service representatives higher in most question categories. The results indicate that the participants would prefer to interact with human service representatives over customer service chatbots which indicates that there is still opposition and challenges surrounding the adoption of customer service chatbots in e-commerce.