The Effect of the Gender and a Personal Greeting of the Chatbot on the User Satisfaction

In the past few years, the number of bots online has increased enormously, ranging from search engines to chatbots for customer service and spambots on social media. The world is surrounded by these user interfaces even though most of the people have a poor knowledge of how these conversational agents are interacting. In this thesis, I study the effect of the gender and the personal greeting of a chatbot on user satisfaction. Data were collected in an online experiment, in which participants conversed with a customer service chatbot from the fictive airline ‘CarryMe’. The gender and the type of communication (personal greeting or not) varied across treatments. Gender had a significant effect on the mean user satisfaction score. More specifically, the female chatbot scored higher on satisfaction than the male chatbot. Impact of the personal greeting was less clear. Impersonal chatbots seemed to positively affect satisfaction but it depended on the type of statistical test used. There was also some evidence that the personal female chatbot scored higher on user satisfaction than the personal male chatbot.