Research on Artificial Intelligence Customer Service on Consumer Attitude and Its Impact during Online Shopping

Abstract

Currently, AI customer service is gaining popularity at a high rate, with over 92% of online shoppers having experience with AI customer service. The question is: what attitudes do consumers have towards AI customer service? A randomly selected sample of 670 consumers was surveyed and the study found that 71.5% of consumers accept or at least do not resist AI customer service. The main reasons AI customer service is so popular are that it is fulltime responsive, absolutely neutral, more objective, and represents a future trend. Nevertheless, 28.5% of consumers are still resistant to AI chatbot, mainly because they are not as relevant, effective, and smooth as a human customer service agent. Besides, there are prevalent obstacles to seamlessly bridge AI chatbots with human agents. In terms of explicitly specified AI chatbots versus concealed AI chatbots, merchants should have them specified since consumers have strong antipathy with AI chatbots disguising as human agents. Furthermore, there are differences in attitudes towards AI customer service across age and educational background. Accordingly, we recommend that, in the context of the overall improvement of service quality, to slow down the pace of AI replacing human agents, to do so in a step-by-step and orderly manner, and to give consumers adequate choice for human agents versus AI chatbots. Finally, to fully promote AI customer service, it is an essential measure to increase its media coverage and publicity.