The Impact of Anthropomorphic Roles of Brand Online Chatbots on Customer Engagement
Text-based chatbots are widely used in online customer service for brands due to the low cost and high efficiency.It is of great significance to explore how to use chatbots to promote consumer-brand relationships.An experimental study was conducted to investigate the impact of different anthropomorphic roles of chatbots on customer engagement.The results show that chatbots with friend roles are more likely to improve customer engagement than assistant roles,and that parasocial inter-action mediate the above effect.When the self-brand distance is close,chatbots with friend roles generate stronger parasocial interaction than assistant roles,thus improving customer engagement;however,there is no significant difference in the impacts of chatbots with friend roles and those of chatbots with assistant roles on parasocial interaction and customer engagement when the self-brand distance is far.Therefore,organizations need to focus on their roles when deploying chatbots,adopting the right type of role based on the customer's perceived distance from the brand prior to the interaction,so as to create a positive customer experience.
万方数据
维普
