Exploring Online Help-Seeking Tendencies: The Influence of Experience Type and Help Provider Type

Businesses are increasingly providing online assistance through help features to enhance the user experience in the digital era. Understanding factors influencing users’ tendencies to seek online help is crucial for optimizing resources and improving support and the overall user experience. Drawing on utilitarian- and hedonic-motivation systems theory, this paper examines how the type of experience and the type of help provider impact users’ online help-seeking behavior. Across three studies—including secondary data analysis, an online experiment, and an observational study of actual user behavior—we found that users are more (vs. less) inclined to seek help when encountering difficulties in utilitarian (vs. hedonic) experiences. This pattern was driven by users’ greater focus on achieving specific outcomes in utilitarian contexts, in contrast to their emphasis on experiential enjoyment in hedonic contexts. Importantly, users showed a stronger preference for seeking assistance from human agents over service robots when facing challenges in utilitarian experiences. Nevertheless, during hedonic experiences, no notable difference between humans and robots emerged in users’ inclination to seek help. These findings highlight the importance of considering the type of experience and the type of help provider when planning online support services, contributing valuable insights to the literature on hedonic vs. utilitarian motivation systems, users’ online help-seeking behavior, and user experience.