Determinants Of E-commerce Consumers' Intention To Adopt Intelligent Customer Service

As a representative of artificial intelligence,intelligent customer service robots have emerged in the fields of communications,finance,and retail,and they are changing the structure of labor force and working mode of the entire customer service industry.However,although the general trend indicates that intelligent customer service will take the place of traditional manual customer service,the industry still faces many challenges in terms of market acceptance and robot performance.Therefore,comprehensive and rigorous academic research on intelligent customer service is crucial.Through reviewing and combing relevant literature in the field of intelligent customer service,we find that the research achievements mainly focus on the design,key technologies,and application of intelligent customer service system,whereas there is hardly any discussion on the behavior intention of intelligent customer service users.In addition,in the aspect of application fields,the existing achievements mainly concentrate on online education,online medical care,and library consulting,while the intelligent customer service research in the context of e-commerce is relatively scarce.In order to fill the gap of intelligent customer service research on user behavior intention,this research uses the S-O-R model,information system success model,perceived value theory,technology acceptance model,and flow theory as theoretical basis to explore the influence of consumers' perceptions triggered by the design factors of intelligent customer service system on adopting intention,and at the same time whether there exists a gap between the above-mentioned fects in different purchasing stages.A total of 201 valid samples under 16 scenarios were obtained through situational questionnaire survey.Research hypotheses were validated using the structural equation model,and the moderating effects and interaction effects were further analyzed.As is shown in the empirical research,e-commerce consumers' intention to adopt intelligent customer service is directly promoted by perceived usefulness,perceived enjoyment,and subjective norm,while perceived risk has negative impact on consumer adopting intention.Improving system quality will help enhance consumers' perceived ease of use,perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment,and reduce perceived cost,and the effects of system quality on perceived usefulness,perceived enjoyment,and perceived cost are significant only in after-sales scenario.Information quality has positive impact on perceived ease of use,perceived usefulness,and perceived enjoyment,and has negative effect on perceived cost and perceived risk.Service quality positively affects perceived ease of use,perceived usefulness,and perceived enjoyment,negatively influences perceived cost and perceived risk,and the effects of service quality on perceived cost and perceived risk are only significant under pre-sales scenario.The current study contributes to intelligent customer service study in the following aspects.Firstly,this study integrates and extends the information system success model and technology acceptance model,providing a new research logic as "system design-individual perception-behavior intention" for follow-up research.Secondly,innovatively introducing business scenarios as moderating variable into the research framework,confirming that the effects of design factors of intelligent customer service system on consumer perception are of different forms between pre-sales and after-sales scenarios.Finally,based on empirical analysis conclusions,management insights are provided for intelligent customer service and e-commerce platforms from different perspectives.For example,intelligent customer service is supposed to accurately identify consumers' intention for the purpose of barrier-free human-machine communication,and provide intimate personalized service as well as meet users' emotional communication needs.Additionally,the ease of use of intelligent customer service system ought to be improved moderately.As far as e-commerce platforms are concerned,the visibility of their intelligent customer service should be emphasized,and they should encourage users to recommend intelligent customer service to friends,and also raise public awareness through promotion.