Online chat encounters: Satisfying customers through dialogical interaction

Judith Anne Garretson Folse, Dora E. Bock, Stephanie M. Mangus and Kristina K. Lindsey Hall

Journal of Business Research, 2025, vol. 190, issue C

Abstract: This research examines the effects of dialogical interaction within online chat (DIOC) on satisfaction, given the marketplace prevalence of these online customer–agent interactions and limited scholarly evidence about their impact. Drawing on service-dominant logic, person–environment fit theory, and existing dialogical interaction (DI) literature, the authors assess predictions using six experiments, including one on the live chat platform Slack, to demonstrate that DIOC significantly boosts satisfaction, especially among customers with utilitarian versus hedonic motives. This effect is explained by goal congruency. The authors also investigate boundary conditions where DIOC’s impact varies, finding it more beneficial for utilitarian-motivated customers when customer–agent similarity is low. Further, dialogical interaction with chatbots and human agents yields similar levels of customer satisfaction for utilitarian-motivated customers. In contrast, hedonically driven customers have higher levels of satisfaction when interacting with human agents. These findings offer practical implications for optimizing customers’ experiences in online chats.

Keywords: Dialogical interaction; Online chat; Customer motive; Satisfaction; Goal congruency; Similarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296325000207
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:190:y:2025:i:c:s0148296325000207

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115197

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().