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    Business Briefs: Named Chatbots, Funny Chatbots & Big AI Workplace Feelings

    Welcome to Business Briefs! The world of academic publications features fascinating findings from real-world experiments in business and the marketplace. Here are some key takeaways and applicable nuggets of knowledge that may be helpful for your business.

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    Should You Name Your Chatbot?

    AI is all the rage these days. It’s either going to save us all or kill us all, depending on who you ask. Regardless, “AI” is an umbrella term that refers to a lot of different types of tools used in the workplace. Chatbots are one type of AI tool.

    Just to make sure we’re all defining “chatbot” the same way here, we’re referring to the instant help feature you can activate on a website. That tool allows you to ask a question, and a chatbot is often the first responder. Sometimes you can talk to a real person too. But other times, all you get is the bot. 

    There are lots of ways to study the impact of chatbots. Customer satisfaction seems like the most obvious thing to investigate, but researchers recently asked a more specific question: How do customer responses change when a chatbot gets a name…like “Jamie”?

    To find out, they ran five studies, one of which involved no less than 461,689 chatbot conversations. What they found was that, for angry customers, a chatbot with a name was more likely to lead to customer dissatisfaction. Further, after working with chatbots who were named, angry customers were also also less likely to want to become repeat customers (lower purchase intentions).    

    Perhaps naming the bot might have engendered especially unrealistic expectations in angry customers? Regardless, the researchers pointed out that named bots didn’t perturb regular customers in any particular way. But watch out for the angry ones…

    Read more here

    Blame the Bot: Anthropomorphism and Anger in Customer–Chatbot Interactions – Cammy Crolic, Felipe Thomaz, Rhonda Hadi, and Andrew T. Stephen, Journal of Marketing

    What if the Chatbot was Funny?

    Continuing down the chatbot rabbit hole, another set of researchers ran a series of studies to assess the impact of humor on customer satisfaction with both chatbots and human customer service agents. 

    In the first experiment, subjects reviewed an interaction between a fictional company and a customer who was overcharged. The subjects were asked to imagine themselves as the customer. When the chatbot was funny, the subjects’ customer satisfaction was increased. The same increase in customer satisfaction was not observed when a human representative leveraged humor. Humor only works for chatbots.

    The first experiment showed that chatbots do better when they include humor, and additional investigations indicated that type of humor matters. Experimenting with different types of humor, the researchers found that aggressive humor in chatbots yields less positive results than milder forms of humor.

    You want to know exactly what the funny chatbots said, don’t you? Well, in the first experiment, one that involved a customer concern about being overcharged, the humor was in this statement: “This is not what we mean when we say we want to take our customer’s breath away! CPR time anyone?!”  

    As for the less successful aggressive humor, that came up in an experiment that involved buying airline tickets. The chatbot said, “Breaking into the TSA servers. Let’s put you on the ‘No Fly List’… Ha! Just kidding! Searching for flights now.”

    Read more here

    The Influence of Chatbot Humour on Consumer Evaluations of Services – Hyunju Shin, Isabella Bunosso, and Lindsay R. Levine, International Journal of Consumer Studies

    Not Bot: AI Hiring

    Moving away from the chatbots for a moment, Pew Research Center has been conducting surveys to collect our perceptions on the expanding roles of AI in the workplace. While there seems to be a great deal of uncertainly about what will really happen with AI, Americans definitely have opinions about it. 

    In a survey of 11,004 American adults…

    • 71% oppose AI making a final hiring decision but…
    • 47% think AI would do a better job of evaluating applicants using a consistent standard.
    • 62% think  AI will have a big workplace impact but…
    • 28% think it will impact their worklife personally.
    • 43% think AI should monitor driving behavior in transportation jobs and…
    • 52% oppose it being used to monitor desk breaks in offices. 

    Of course AI isn’t capable of emotions (yet), so it doesn’t really care what we think. 

    Read more here

    AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think – Lee Rainie, Monica Anderson, Colleen McClain, Emily A. Vogels and Risa Gelles-Watnick, Pew Research Center

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    Miriam Bowers Abbott
    Miriam Bowers Abbotthttps://columbusunderground.com
    Miriam Bowers Abbott is a freelancer contributor to Columbus Underground who reviews restaurants, writes food-centric featurettes and occasionally pens other community journalism pieces.
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