Empathy and Chatbots: The effect of Empathy Exhibited by Chatbots on the Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Customer Experience and the Moderating Role of Anxiety
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2023-07-04
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en
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise and firms are more and more experimenting with its capabilities. One of the ways AI is implemented is in conversational agents or better known as chatbots. Chatbots continues to reshape customer-firm interactions as more firms are using chatbots for their service interactions. However, chatbots are perceived differently as opposed to human agents and could be inadequate replacements for human agents. One of the main characteristics of a human to human interaction is empathy, which plays an important role in interpersonal interactions. It refers to the ability and sensitivity to understand the mental state of others. The current state of technology makes it possible to model artificial empathy in chatbots which could potentially lead to improved service interactions of customers with chatbots. While the benefits of empathy and its positive effect on the customer experience are prominent in existing literature, it remains rather unknown what the effect of empathy exhibited by chatbots will be in this new machine to human context. This thesis aims to examine the effects of empathy exhibited by chatbots on the emotional, social, and customer experience as compared to no empathy, taking into consideration the moderating role of anxiety.
The findings could not confirm any effects of empathy on the emotional, social, and cognitive customer experience. In addition, the moderating role of anxiety on this relationship could not be affirmed. The findings could establish that users are able to see a difference in empathy exhibited by a chatbot as compared to no empathy. Furthermore, perceived empathy pointed out to have a positive correlation with the emotional, social, and cognitive customer experience and a positive correlation with customer satisfaction. Moreover, the emotional, social, and cognitive customer experience are positively related to customer satisfaction. Recognizing that users’ expectations and beliefs can influence how an empathic chatbot is perceived, it seems that modeling empathy in chatbots leads to a better experience with the service interaction as compared to no empathy.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen