Chatbot service usage during a pandemic: fear and social distancing

ABSTRACT

Health organizations have relied heavily on social distancing to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this research is to examine what factors can influence customers’ evaluations of social distancing as well as how and when these evaluations drive their usage of chatbot services. Using structural equation modeling to analyze the experimental data from 200 U.S. consumers, we found that when the service situation is utilitarian (hedonic) in nature, customers’ contamination fear influences their chatbot usage during service encounters through their social distancing attitudes (subjective norms) and then perceived usefulness of chatbots. Our findings provide meaningful theoretical contributions and practical implications.

摘要

全球的衛生組織相當倚重保持社交距離來減少新型冠狀病毒的擴散。這篇文章的 結果顯示在不同的服務情況下(功利/享樂主義)，消費者對於維持社交距離的看法 會進一步影響他們對於聊天機器人的使用程 度。

KEYWORDS:

• Fear
• social distancing
• perceived usefulness
• chatbot services
• theory of reasoned action

關鍵字:

• 恐懼
• 社交距離
• 感知有用性
• 聊天機器人
• 理性行為理論。

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We also examined the proposed model while controlling for participants’ prior experience using chatbot services (no vs. yes). We found that the patterns of hypothesis testing results remained the same.