The Deployment of Chatbots within Customer Experience Management

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Caused by the ongoing digitalization and the plurality of interaction channels, the amount of touchpoints between companies and customers increases by more than 20 percent each year. As a consequence, the customer journey, that is the customer path from the pre-purchase phase, via the purchase phase through to the post-purchase phase, gets more complex. As customer experiences directly influence company evaluations and customers' willingness to buy, companies are interested in designing the customer experiences at the respective touchpoints in an optimal way. Rapid developments in the area of artificial intelligence now allow companies to employ digital interaction tools. Such interaction tools, particularly chatbots, bear great potential for the management of customer experiences along the customer journey. Chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence and enable one-to-one interactions with customers. To date there is a paucity of research on the effective deployment of chatbots in customer experience management.The overarching aim of this project is to close this research gap by conducting empirical studies based on the Social Response Theory, the Uncanny Valley concept, and the Media Richness Theory. To this end, we plan to investigate how customers perceive chatbots. In doing so, we especially consider characteristics that make chatbots appear more or less human-like. We postulate that these characteristics affect customers' perception of the chatbots which in turn affects chatbot effectiveness like customers' perceived service quality and willingness to buy. Additionally, we aim to uncover to what extent the effectiveness of chatbots differs between the customer journey phases based on phase-specific customer requirements.To gain first insights regarding the deployment of chatbots within customer experience management, we initially conduct expert interviews with companies that already use chatbots. We then build upon this qualitative data basis by conducting three laboratory experiments with consumers that comprise all three phases of the customer journey. A final field experiment aims at investigating the effectiveness of the deployment of chatbots in practice and at validating the laboratory experiment results.The project bears valuable implications for research and practice. Particularly the Uncanny Valley concept is transferred into an entirely new application context, is updated, and, in this way, spurring fruitful future research. Based on the project results and following the consumer-based strategy approach, we can derive essential recommendations for companies regarding the deployment of chatbots along the entire customer journey.