Let me talk to your human: The impact of uncertainty avoidance on chatbot acceptance

Abstract

Chatbots are increasingly becoming part of the service context. While companies around the world choose to integrate chatbots as part of the customer experience as a way to achieve higher efficiency and lower costs, little is known about utterly voice-enabled chatbots substituting a front-line employee in customer service. Since people tend to prefer humans over artificial intelligence, we propose to diminish the gap between customers’ and companies’ desires, by studying why people disfavor chatbots in service encounters, exploring the underlying process via the superior capacity of humans (vs. chatbots) to provide higher perceptions of customer orientation and empathy. Across two experimental studies (N = 563), we show that chatbots have a negative effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and this effect is mediated by customer orientation and empathy (study 1). Nevertheless, resistance to non-human agents is mitigated in contexts with low (vs. high) uncertainty avoidance (study 2). Hence, for uncertainty avoidance contexts, i.e., Portugal, human agents show better results than chatbots, but the effects are not relevant in low uncertainty avoidance, i.e., USA. These findings suggest that it is critical for managers to both carefully consider the financial benefits of chatbots and customers’ cultural-related values to guarantee a tangible customer experience.