The effect of chatbot personality on emotional connection and customer satisfaction

Firms are always looking for ways to engage their customers. Chatbots could be such a new way to engage customers. The e- commerce domain could benefit greatly from this chatbot technology by providing a more intuitive way of interacting with the website and act as a personal assistant helping the customer find the right product. But there is no to little empirical knowledge on how these chatbots are used in everyday settings. Personality is essential in chatbot design and has a major influence on human-robot interaction. Chatbot personality can be expressed in linguistics as linguistic style is an indicator of personality. This research will explore the effects that chatbot personality could have on adopted customer engagement factors customer satisfaction and emotional connection within a e- commerce domain. Two text-based chatbots are created, one with introvert and one with extrovert linguistics. An experiment in combination with a survey are used to gather the data needed for this research. Results found that extrovert linguistics had a more positive effect on both customer satisfaction and emotional connection than introvert linguistics.