Understanding the joint effects of internal and external anthropomorphic cues of intelligent customer service bot on user satisfaction

As one specific type of chatbot, Intelligent Customer Service Bot (ICSB) satisfies users by providing uninterrupted customer service and reducing response time. However, users still prefer to interact with humans rather than robots. In previous studies, scholars have focused more on enhancing the anthropomorphic characteristics of chatbot by treating anthropomorphic characteristics as a general concept. Few literatures have studied the influence of both external and internal features on user satisfaction and the possible interactive effects between the two dimensions of chatbot anthropomorphic cues. Therefore, this paper studies the main effects of internal anthropomorphic constructs (cognitive empathy and emotional empathy) and external anthropomorphic constructs (virtual appearance) of ICSB on user satisfaction, as well as the two-way and three-way interaction effects among them. With a scenario-based survey of 331 respondents, the results confirm the hypotheses about the main effects, the two-way and three-way interaction effects in the model.