How does an Intelligence Chatbot Affect Customers Compared with Self-Service Technology for Sustainable Services?

Taehyee Um, Taekyung Kim and Namho Chung
Additional contact information
Taehyee Um: Department of Hotel Management, College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02447, Korea
Taekyung Kim: Business School, Kwangwoon University, Seoul 01897, Korea
Namho Chung: Smart Tourism Research Platform, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02447, Korea

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 12, 1-21

Abstract: To gain competitive advantages and sustainable service innovation, hotels are considering artificial intelligence technologies (AI), including robots, kiosks for service automation and chatbots. However, due to the change of the service process and unfamiliar communication interface, hotel customers may have difficulties in adopting the new change. In this paper, we tried to find out if the failure of AI-based services would affect customers’ perception. For this, we designed the experiment by separating AI (i.e., chatbot) services and self-service technology (SST, i.e., pad) services and service failures and successful cases, respectively. As a result, SST showed more positive perceptions and revisit intention in the successful service situation. The service failure situation showed no differences between chatbot and SST. In addition, novelty and the need for interaction characteristics of customers showed significant differences between groups in terms of service success and failure, respectively. Additionally, we explored negative word-of-mouth (WOM) to learn further effects by service failures and successes.

Keywords: chatbot; self-service technology; service failure; hotel; status quo bias theory; artificial intelligence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/12/5119/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/12/5119/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:12:p:5119-:d:375357

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().