“Help, I don’t want to call..” A Qualitative Comparative Study between Dutch and South-Korean consumers on Chatbots and Digital Humans

The consumer experience has become increasingly digital: chatbots have been introduced as a new touchpoint in the customer experience, making the service automated due to Artificial Intelligence. Besides the automation of the online customer service, companies attempt to humanize this interaction by attributing human-like features to the chatbot. The studies conducted on chatbots in the field of e-commerce are mainly conducted on the reception of chatbots, tested in experiment-based research and focusing on the effectiveness of a humanized aspect of the chatbot design. Therefore, a gap in the literature is apparent due to the lack of theoretical depth acquired and lack of contextual understanding of consumers motivations to use chatbots. In other words, academic research has focused on the effectiveness of humanized interaction, but what factors make consumers motivated to use chatbots in the first place? And if they are motivated, how is that preference constructed? This research focused on the digital customer experience as a whole, allowing to incorporate the perceived downsides of chatbots and other preferred touchpoints in the shopping experience. To interpret these motivations, the Uses & Gratifications theory has been utilized. The research used five gratifications of the theory to operationalize the following research question: How do Dutch consumers perceive anthropomorphic chatbots and digital humans from e-commerce businesses in comparison to South-Korean consumers? This question was answered through conducting twelve semi-structured interviews among six Dutch consumers and six South-Korean consumers, between 21 and 27 years old. One of the most important results was a new gratification: the preference of social distance. The gratification means that a group of interviewees prefer platonic interaction of chatbots over humanized interaction from digital humans, due to feeling socially anxious when answering according to the social norms. This opposes contemporary research on the humanization of chatbots. However, this gratification does support the theory on Computers As Social Actors (CASA), which assumes that humans will regard a technology as a social entity when assigned social-cues. The research has deepened the U&G theory on chatbots and digital humans, and has found one difference between the perception of Dutch and South-Korean users: South-Korean users have a clear overall preference for platonic interaction, whereas Dutch users acknowledge the positive influence of humanized interaction on their attitude towards the chatbot.