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Cold Comfort Matters - How Channel-Wise Emotional Strategies Help in a Customer Service Chatbot

Published: 25 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Smart service chatbots, aiming to provide efficient customer service, have increased rapidly. Currently, few task-oriented chatbots had employed emotion strategies together with problem solving process. Meanwhile, customers can have different preference across channels (e.g., social media and webpages). This paper presented the design for a series of emotional strategies (ES) combined with task-solving, and tested its effectiveness across channels. In the multi-channel service chatbot, Moli, we compared ES with brief apology (BA) and no emotion responses (NER) in a Wizard of Oz study. The results indicated the effectiveness of the emotion strategies borrowed from psychotherapy technologies. Meanwhile, we found customers preferred brief and direct strategies on webpage, whereas rich emotional strategies in all stages were more favorable on social media. With detailed strategy design, the "cold comfort" was found helpful for building human-machine relationships, pacifying emotions, and improving satisfaction and system usability.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2020
    4474 pages
    ISBN:9781450368193
    DOI:10.1145/3334480
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 April 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. cognitive behavior therapy
    2. customer service chatbot
    3. emotional strategies
    4. social media
    5. webpage

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    Cited By

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    • (2025)Human-robot collaboration in service recovery: Examining apology styles, comfort emotions, and customer retentionInternational Journal of Hospitality Management10.1016/j.ijhm.2024.104028126(104028)Online publication date: Apr-2025
    • (2024)Beyond Text and Speech in Conversational Agents: Mapping the Design Space of AvatarsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661563(1875-1894)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Exploring the Impact of User-Participated Customization in Experiencing Chatbot FailureExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651102(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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