We consumers are fickle. We expect the products to be perfect, and customer service to be fast and precise. Problem is, people are sometimes neither of those last two.
So little surprise that many brands have turned to chatbots to supplement, or — in some cases — to completely replace their human customer service team.
Some Examples
- Take AFLAC‚ which famously has a duck as a mascot. A couple of years ago, it introduced DuckChat, an AI bot on Facebook messenger that would help enrol customers.
- Or Bank of America, that made a chatbot named Erica, and set her to work in its mobile app, helping customers with basic banking tasks.
- There's Levi's Virtual Stylist, a bot inside Facebook Messenger
- There's even LubeChat — which, no, not what you're thinking — this was actually a B2B chatbot from Shell, which helped share product information for customers of its industrial lubricants.
The Academic Study
And while a lot of research has gone into how consumers react to chatbot conversations, there hasn't been a lot of study into how the bots make people feel about the company itself… people like investors in the company.
That's what Darima Fotheringham set out to discover. She is co-author of an academic study called “The effect of implementing chatbot customer service on stock returns” which was published recently in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Our podcast host Tod Maffin spoke with her about her research:
Tod: You measured how investors reacted when it Company announced that they'd start using chatbots. What did you find?
Dr. Fotheringham: We saw a positive bump in stock option price on the day of the [AI chatbot] announcement — investors did see the value that the chatbots could provide to customers and responded with their purchasing power.
Tod: Was there any difference between b2c brands and b2b brands?
Dr. Fotheringham: We found that this positive bump was especially significant for b2b companies. As we know, b2b companies are often lagging behind and digital customer experience compared to b2c companies. So these chatbots did provide a really good bump for b2b companies, showing that investors saw the opportunity of potential opportunity of increasing customer experience for b2b customers. And we saw that reflected positively in the stock price of these companies.
Tod: But there was an exception, though, in your research — when those chatbots and b2b brands became more human. In other words, they were anthropomorphized and you found the more human a bot was, the less investors liked its use in b2b brands specifically, Did that surprise you?
Dr. Fotheringham: If you think about the differences between b2b and b2c customers, b2b customers are busy people. They really prioritize functionality, effectiveness, and efficiencies over all these bells and whistles of adding this anthropomorphic features, or adding names and sprinkling some personality features in. I knows some companies were even hiring a comics to write jokes for for their chatbots. But for b2b customers, all they're interested in is the efficiencies.
Tod: Did you study the market reaction to how chat bots were rolled out? I'm thinking like companies that just started the bots up on day one, versus those that may have started with a small beta pool of customers.
Dr. Fotheringham: Yes. And what we found was that a soft launch, a beta launch with a segment of customers, was much more positively received by investors. So investors really valued and more measured approach to implementing such novel technology.
