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Published in:
2022 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
The Effects of Conversational Agents’ Emotion Cues on Their Perceived Responsiveness and Consumers’ Intention to Act: An Abstract
Author : Justina Sidlauskiene
Published in: Celebrating the Past and Future of Marketing and Discovery with Social Impact
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
Conversational agents allow products and services to be sold through real-time one-on-one conversations. However, consumers tend to engage with humans and resist conversational agents. Further, conversation abandonment without leaving personal information (e.g., email) leaves marketers without the ability to re-engage with potential customers.
Drawing on the Social Information Processing theory and Affect-as-Information model, this study investigates how emotion cues: a higher positive tone from the conversational agent and emojis influence (1) the agent’s responsiveness perception, and (2) consumers’ intention to disclose personally-identifying information (email) to the agent retailer. The research uses a computerized text analysis of the chat scenarios and a 2 (low vs higher emotional tone) × 2 (emoji use vs. no emoji use) between-subjects experimental design.
This research focuses on the effect of emotional tone and emoji use on the conversational agent’s perceived responsiveness and consumers’ intention to disclose their personal information to the agent in a text-based conversational commerce context. When the conversational agent’s emotional tone was higher, it was perceived as being more responsive. However, the effect of emoji use on the perception of agents’ responsiveness was not significant. Finally, the present research found that the effect of higher emotional tone, emoji use, and the interaction term was significant for consumers’ intention to disclose their email to the agent retailer.
This study provides several managerial implications; although emoji use did not result in higher perceived responsiveness, emojis and higher emotional tone can be used to promote email disclosure to the agent retailers and thus enable marketers to collect valuable consumer data. Further, an emotional tone can benefit a conversational website, particularly one in need of incorporating customers’ personal information to provide personalized products. The findings contribute to the growing research stream on integrating emotion cues into conversational agents and their impact on consumers’ perceptions and personal information disclosure.