The Influence Of Online Customer Service Chatbots’ Interactivity On Customer Likability

With the development of artificial intelligence and media technology,the absence of entities in interpersonal communication has become common,and the boundary between Human-Machine Interaction and Interpersonal Interaction has become blurred.Now Chatbot is a part of Human-Machine Communication,which arouses the attention of scholars.Chatbot has been widely used in enterprise production and customer services and task-based online customer service chatbots are common.They always interact with users as the "Information-Avatar ",helping users solve problems at any time.However,sometimes they fail to give users the correct answers and the interactive quality cannot be guaranteed.Therefore,this research aims to explore the relationship between online customer service chatbots’ interactivity and user likability to improve the Human-Machine Communication quality.This research uses the questionnaire method.Firstly,in terms of function,explore the relationship among synchronicity,two-way communication,responsiveness and control of online customer service chatbots and users’ likability.Secondly,in the aspect of relationship,when users interact with chatbots,they may subconsciously transfer social relationship and rules to the chatbots,then show them social behaviors.Based on the theory of social presence,this research explores whether users can feel the closeness,warmth,comfort or support in Human-Machine Interaction,using SPSS to analysis the statistics and test hypotheses based on valid questionnaire.The result indicates that,there are significant differences in the social presence and likability for different ages,different educational backgrounds,and different monthly expenditures groups.In terms of function,two-way communication,responsiveness and control of online customer service chatbots significantly positively affect user likability,and responsiveness is the biggest pain point for users.Synchronicity has no significant positive correlation with user likability.In terms of relationship,currently the users’ social presence is at a low level.Social presence plays a part of the mediating role in two-way communication,responsiveness,control and user likability.In the future,privacy risk,trust,ethics and other issues under the "heating up" of the human-robot relationship require more scholars to explore.