A Framework and Content Analysis of Social Cues in the Introductions of Customer Service Chatbots

Organizations are increasingly implementing chatbots to address customers’ inquiries, but customers still have unsatisfactory encounters with them. In order to successfully deploy customer service chatbots, it is important for organizations and designers to understand how to introduce them to customers. Arguably, how a chatbot introduces itself as well as its services might influence customers’ perceptions about the chatbot. Therefore, a framework was developed to annotate the social cues in chatbot introductions. In order to validate our framework, we conducted a content analysis of introductions of customer service chatbots (n = 88). The results showed that the framework turned out to be a reliable identification instrument. Moreover, the most prevalent social cue in chatbot introductions was a humanlike avatar, whereas communication cues, indicating the chatbot’s functionalities, hardly occurred. The paper ends with implications for the design of chatbot introductions and possibilities for future research.