| The development of information technology enables the development of e-commerce.With the rapid development of online shopping platforms such as Taobao and JD.com,the scale of online shopping continues to expand.In order to solve the problem of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers,the platform merchants will provide online customer service to realize information circulation and real-time interaction with consumers.The initially set human customer service can interact with consumers in real time,reduce the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers,and improve the sales volume of stores.However,as more and more consumers flock to the online shopping platform,the workload of human customer service increases,and the limitations of human customer service also begin to appear,such as low efficiency in answering questions and high management costs.At the same time,the rapid development and maturity of AI technology make it possible to apply AI customer service(also known as "chatbot")to shopping platforms.Due to the many benefits that AI customer service can bring,such as improving the efficiency of problem solving and reducing the cost of enterprises using online customer service,the market scale of AI customer service is expanding rapidly.With the use of AI customer service,some functions of human customer service begin to shift to AI customer service,such as the reply of some structured questions.The management cost of human customer service and the many benefits of AI customer service make more and more enterprises choose to reduce human customer service and increase the deployment of AI customer service.However,the use of AI customer service has also brought some problems,such as answering stiff and mechanical questions,unable to accurately understand questions,and so on.These problems often lead to consumers’ demand for human customer service and reduce their willingness to continue using.From the perspective of exploring how to improve consumers’ continuance use intention to online customer service,the model framework of this study is constructed.From the perspective of uniqueness theory,this paper explores the impact mechanism of service recovery behavior of online customer service(artificial customer service vs.intelligent customer service)on consumers’ continuance use intention.Based on sorting out the existing literature,this paper takes the service recovery behavior of online customer service(human customer service vs.AI customer service)as the independent variable,the uniqueness consideration as the mediator variable,and the communication style as the moderator variable.Through three experiments,this study found that compared with AI customer service,the service recovery behavior provided by human customer service can improve consumers’ continuance use intention,and uniqueness considerations play an mediation role.Moreover,communication style plays a moderating role between the service recovery provided by online customer service(human customer service vs.AI customer service)and consumers’ continuance use intention.Specifically,in the context of taskoriented communication style,compared with AI customer service,human customer service has a higher impact on customers’ continuance use intention,while there is no significant difference in the context of social-oriented communication style.This study extends the research literature on intelligent customer service to a certain extent,and also provides some valuable management implications for the online platform in the application of AI customer service(for example,human customer service cannot be replaced,and online customer service should be reasonably allocated for different tasks). |
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