Paper Info
Title
Cold Comfort Matters - How Channel-Wise Emotional Strategies Help in a Customer Service Chatbot
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3334480.3382905
CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Honolulu HI USA April, 2020
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Customer service chatbot, emotional strategies, social media, webpage, cognitive behavior therapy
Conference
978-1-4503-6819-3
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mingming Liu100.68
Qicheng Ding262.91
Yu Zhang329498.00
Yu Zhang429498.00
Guoguang Zhao501.01
Changjian Hu601.35
Jiangtao Gong775.23
Penghui Xu800.68
Liuxin Zhang903.38
Qianying Wang1013.72