Elucidating The Factors That Influence Consumers’ Continuance Intention To Use Artificial Intelligence Chatbots

In the competitive market,customer service has become the key for enterprises to win core competitiveness and market share.In order to improve the customer retention rate,enterprises must strive to improve their service specialization level."How to improve the response speed of customer service under the premise of low user support cost?" Has become a problem that enterprises must face.Under the background of rapid technology such as big data processing and artificial intelligence,artificial intelligence(AI)chatbots came into being,which provided a new solution to the pain points such as high labor cost and low service efficiency in the customer service industry.However,due to the disadvantages of current AI chatbots in actual use,such as rigid answering irrelevant questions and the response of users’ demand can not be real-time,which to a great extent affects the users’ shopping experience and affects their continuance intention to use it.And the research on AI chatbots mainly focuses on financial services,e-government,online medical care and other fields,while the research on AI chatbots in e-commerce scenarios is relatively scarce.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the influencing factors and the mechanism of consumers’ continuance intention to use AI chatbots in e-commerce context.In order to fill the gap in the research of AI chatbots,this study is based on expectation confirmation theory and social presence theory.From the perspective of cognitive and emotional satisfaction,this study explores the effect of consumers’ psychological state caused by the design factors of AI chatbots system on their continuance intention to use AI chatbots in e-commerce context.A total of 315 valid samples were obtained by questionnaire survey,and the data were tested empirically by Smart PLS3.0 software.The empirical results are as follows:(1)Social presence,cognitive satisfaction and emotional satisfaction can actively improve consumers’ continuance intention to use AI chatbots;(2)Service performance confirmation and social presence have positive effects on consumers’ cognitive and emotional satisfaction;(3)Anthropomorphic enhances consumers’ service performance confirmation and social presence;(4)AI flexibility,AI timeliness and AI reliability improve consumers’ service performance confirmation;AI accuracy effectively improves consumers’ cognitive satisfaction;AI accuracy and AI reliability effectively improve consumers’ emotional satisfaction.The contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly,the influence mechanism study of consumers’ post-use behavior is enriched by a combination of two perspectives: customers’ technical perception and emotional perception(such as emotional satisfaction and social presence)of AI chatbots.Secondly,it defines satisfaction as a dual structure including cognitive factors and emotional factors.In the context of e-commerce,it verifies the influence mechanism of AI chatbots’ performance and expectation confirmation on the two types of consumer satisfaction,which provides some theoretical reference for e-commerce enterprises to obtain long-term consumer satisfaction.Finally,the expectation confirmation theory and social presence theory will be combined effectively to play a complementary role in a more scientific research on the continuance intention to use AI chatbots.