Consumers’ Tolerance When Confronted with Different Service Types in Service Retailing

Consumers’ Tolerance When Confronted with Different Service Types in Service Retailing

Purpose: With the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) in the service industry and occurrence of service failures in AI-based services, understanding human-robot interaction issues in service failure situations is especially important. Some issues which deserve further empirical investigation are whether consumers can develop the same tolerance for chatbots after service failure as they have for human agents, and the relationship between agent type and tolerance is mediated by the mechanisms of perceived warmth and perceived competence. Research Design, Data, and Methodology: This research experimentally collected and analyzed data from 119 university students who had experienced chatbots service failures. Differences in tolerance towards human agents and chatbots after experiencing service failures were explored, with a further examination of the mediating pathways between this relationship via perceived warmth and perceived competence. Results: Consumers are more tolerant of service failure with chatbots compared to service failure with human agents. Significant mediation of the relationship between service agent and service failure tolerance by perceived competence, while perceived warmth has no significant mediating effect. Conclusions: This research enhances our understanding of AI-assisted services, human-computer interaction, improves the service functionality of existing smart devices, and deepens the understanding of the relationship between consumer responses and behaviors.