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More Than a Bot? The Impact of Disclosing Human Involvement on Customer Interactions with Hybrid Service Agents

Ulrich Gnewuch¹; Stefan Morana²; Oliver Hinz³; Ralf Kellner⁴; Alexander Maedche¹

¹ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany; · ² Saarland University, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany; · ³ Goethe University Frankfurt, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany; · ⁴ University of Passau, 94032 Passau, Germany

To leverage the complementary strengths of humans and artificial intelligence (AI) in online service encounters, firms have begun to use hybrid service agents: combinations of AI agents (e.g., chatbots) and human agents (e.g., service employees) behind a single interface. However, it is unclear whether firms should be transparent about behind-the-scenes employees working in tandem with an AI-based chatbot to serve customers. Against this backdrop, we investigated the impact of human involvement disclosure on customer interactions with hybrid service agents. Our findings suggest that disclosing human involvement before or during an interaction with the hybrid service agent leads customers to adopt a more human-oriented communication style. This effect is driven by impression management concerns that are activated when customers become aware of humans working in tandem with the chatbot. The more human-oriented communication style ultimately increases employee workload because fewer customer requests can be handled automatically by the chatbot and must be delegated to a human. These findings provide novel insights into how and why disclosing human involvement affects customer communication behavior, reveal its negative consequences for employees working in tandem with a chatbot, and highlight the potential costs and benefits of providing transparency in customer–hybrid service agent interactions.

DOI

10.1287/isre.2022.0152

Volume

35 (3)

Pages

936-955

Language

en

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BibTeX

Sources

crossref