The role of the chatbot on customer purchase intention: towards digital relational sales

Letizia Lo Presti (), Giulio Maggiore () and Vittoria Marino ()
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Letizia Lo Presti: University of Rome Unitelma Sapienza
Giulio Maggiore: University of Rome Unitelma Sapienza
Vittoria Marino: University of Sannio

Italian Journal of Marketing, 2021, vol. 2021, issue 3, No 2, 165-188

Abstract: Abstract The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which conversation with a chatbot on an official website can change the value perception of products and influence the customer purchase intention. The study also investigates the role of chatbots on brand familiarity and the influence of previous experience of interaction with chatbots on customer buying intention. Two laboratory experiments were conducted to evaluate the impact of chatbot use on customer purchase intention. Chatbots on websites shift the value perception of hedonic and utilitarian goods towards respectively utilitarian and hedonic values. Chatbots contribute to the brand awareness reducing the effect of familiarity on the customer purchase intention. Retailers should include effective chatbots while operating and designing shopping websites to stimulate the shopping intention of consumers. Companies should design and carefully manage chatbots by monitoring user involvement and quality of customer experience in order to feed a calibrated continuous improvement process on company objectives. The paper represents a first step approach in addressing e-service agents toward the online customer shopping experience. Digital assistants may change the online shopping context increasing the hedonic value experience but at the same time reducing the time for decision making by reinforcing the utilitarian value perception of the utilitarian and hedonic products.

Keywords: Chatbot; Conversational commerce; Customer purchase intention; Value perception; Brand familiarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1007/s43039-021-00029-6

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