Monday, June 16, 2025

Lubricate Chatbot Transactions

When a chatbot employs its artificial intelligence capabilities to interact with a consumer in ways mimicking normal human conversation, the chatbot can be presented to the consumer as being robotic or this can be left unspecified. The choice was of interest to a team of researchers at The Ohio State University as they explored shopper hesitations when purchasing a potentially embarrassing product.
     The personality characteristic the researchers selected as most likely to lead to embarrassment in purchase was self-presentation, which refers to a shopper’s degree of worry about how other people will judge the shopper. The products the researchers used as likely to activate self-presentation worry were genital lubricants and antidiarrheal medications. The overall study finding was that purchase embarrassment is less when the chatbot is clearly identified as a chatbot. This effect was strongest among study participants with the highest self-presentation concerns, as reflected on a brief survey.
     The two-part explanation for the effect, which was supported by the studies: Consumers are likely to conclude the chatbot is actually a human unless it’s been specified otherwise. Consumers feel that a chatbot lacks the mind capabilities to judge others.
     The overall conclusion did have an exception: If the clearly identified chatbot is anthropomorphized—given characteristics of a person—the shopper’s discomfort in interacting with this sales agent about the potentially embarrassing product increases significantly. In the studies, anthropomorphism consisted of including a drawing which incorporated characteristics of a woman, although it was clearly a cartoon and not a photo of a human, and by having the chatbot use emotional language like, “I am so excited to see you!”
     Prior work had concluded that most shoppers far prefer interacting with a human than with a chatbot unless the chatbot shows signs of emotional warmth. In their own studies, the researchers found that people preferred an online store with a human service agent than a store with a chatbot agent when shopping for a non-embarrassing product, namely hay fever medication.
     If your online store sells both potentially embarrassing products and ones which are not, you’ll need to decide when and whether to clearly disclose you’re using a chatbot.
     Or the solution might be in the fact that you carry a variety of products. A common way for customers to reduce self-presentation concerns when selecting a potentially embarrassing product is to purchase a bunch of less sensitive products at the same time.

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Image at top of post based on photo by Pixabay from Pexels

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