Chatbots in service recovery: Crackpot or Jackpot?

Problem Service recovery has been a heavily researched and studied area for\nseveral years. As technology has continued to develop and been\nadapted and incorporated into this field, new research avenues have\nalso opened up, many of which have not been studied in much depth\nas of yet. With very limited research on firms using chatbots as a\nservice encounter in service recovery, we wanted to investigate this\nfurther. Therefore, we wanted to check if there was any difference\nbetween a customer interacting with a human or a chatbot in a\nservice recovery situation and measure this with regard to\nsatisfaction with the firm and recovery.\nPurpose The purpose of this study is to analyse the effect of an unsuccessful\nand a successful service recovery, provided by either a human,\nchatbot or a combination of the two, on satisfaction with the firm\nand service recovery.\nResearch A scenario-based survey experiment was chosen to answer the\nDesign research problem and questions for this thesis. The design used was\na 3 (Chatbot, Human, Chatbot+Human) x 2 (Unsuccessful,\nSuccessful) between subject design.\nFindings Customers are proven to be more satisfied when interacting with\na chatbot in a successful service recovery, than interacting with a\nhuman or a combination of the two. However, when the customers\ninteract with a chatbot in a unsuccessful recovery, they are even\nmore unsatisfied than when interacting with a human or the\ncombination. We also found a significant relationship between the\noutcome variable and satisfaction with recovery and firm, and a\nsignificant interaction effect between the outcome and encounter\nvariables and satisfaction with firm and recovery.\nKeywords Service recovery, customer satisfaction, chatbot, human, service\nfailure, E-commerce, anthropomorphism,