Celebrity at Your Service: The Effects of Digital-Human Customer Service Agents

It is now possible to create digital humans that look and sound like real human celebrities. However, it is unclear whether celebrity effects from product endorsements observed in marketing research transfer to digital-human celebrities providing customer service. We conducted an experiment to investigate the effects of a digital-human celebrity as a customer service agent. We used a state-of-the-art neural rendering method to generate a digital human of Hugh Jackman. Our results show that users’ perceived celebrity of digital-human customer service agents leads to higher perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity of the agents, increasing the perception of trustworthiness and the intention to use the service. Also, when digital-human agents make a mistake, customers forgive celebrity agents more than non-celebrity agents. Contrary to what the prior literature suggests, whether the digital-human agents are controlled by a human or by AI has no influence on the impact of errors on perceived trustworthiness. However, the AI-controlled agents increase the willingness to use the service, though they are perceived to be less benevolent.