How the communication style of chatbots influences consumers’ satisfaction, trust, and engagement in the context of service failure
Open accessAbstract
This study examines consumers’ reactions to the communication styles of chatbots during failed service experiences. The current study explores whether the communication style adopted by a chatbot impacts consumer satisfaction and behavior intention and how expectancy violations can moderate these relationships in the service context. A pre-test examined the validity of the stimuli of chatbots that were either task-oriented or social-oriented after consumers encountered service failure. For more information, the experiment was designed to manipulate the AI-based chatbot agent’s process and style of communication and measure the role of expectancy violations. The main experiment results showed that interactions with social-oriented communication style chatbots enhance the level of consumers’ interaction satisfaction and intention of behavior. Respondents experienced a higher perception of warmth when interacting with social-oriented communication style chatbots than task-oriented. Moreover, expectancy violation moderates the mediation of warmth on the relationship between the chatbot’s communication style/type and interaction satisfaction, trust, and intention of patronage. Setting chatbots’ communication styles to be social-oriented can help reduce negative emotions among consumers caused by service failure; specifically, the perception of warmth created by the social-oriented communication style can alleviate negative evaluations of service agents and companies, such as dissatisfaction and loss of interest. Therefore, in managerial practice, the firm should choose the social-oriented communication style chatbot agent to recover the customer relationship after a service failure.
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Social chatbots, by offering empathic, personalized, and emotionally attuned exchanges, can foster trust and disclosure, which may help reduce negative mental health issues.
“Social chatbots, by offering empathic, personalized, and emotionally attuned exchanges, can foster trust and disclosure, which may help reduce negative mental health issues [69].”
From Generative AI Mental Health Chatbots as Therapeutic Tools: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Their Role in Reducing Mental Health Issues (2025) · cites this paper as [69]
The Discussion reports that social-oriented chatbots increased consumers’ trust through perceived warmth in an online-shopping service-failure setting. The cited paper does not report increased disclosure or reduced mental health problems, and it does not establish the claimed benefit outside that consumer-service setting. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredPrevious literature indicates that social chatbots lead to better consumer satisfaction and social outcomes for older adults.
“This pattern aligns with previous literature on social chatbots leading to better consumer satisfaction [69] and social outcomes for older adults [70].”
From Generative AI Mental Health Chatbots as Therapeutic Tools: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Their Role in Reducing Mental Health Issues (2025) · cites this paper as [69]
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Cites
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Zhang, Q., Zhang, R., Xiong, Y., Sui, Y., Tong, C., & Lin, F.-H. (2025) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/78238 · Cited by 56 · see citing works
“Social chatbots, by offering empathic, personalized, and emotionally attuned exchanges, can foster trust and disclosure, which may help reduce negative mental health issues [69].”
- Authors
- Cai, N., Gao, S., & Yan, J.
- Affiliations
- Gachon University (KR)
- Changzhou Institute of Mechatronic Technology (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Yan, Jinzhe
- ORCID
- Yan, Jinzhe
- Venue
- Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
- Published
- 2024-05-28
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2055-1045 (ISSN-L)
- 2662-9992
- OpenAlex
- W4399106212
- Cited by
- 86
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 50 · 2025: 31 · 2024: 5
- FWCI
- 12.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Customer Service Quality and Loyalty
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Marketing and Social Media
- Keywords
- chatbots, service failure, customer satisfaction, consumer trust, customer engagement, behavioral intention, expectancy violation, perceived warmth, task-oriented chatbots
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