The Impact of Conversational Agents on Humans in Services: Research Questions and Hypotheses
Bălan Carmen · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2018
The research focused on conversational agents and chatbots is dominated by perspectives specific to computer science, engineering and social sciences. The fields of business, management and decision sciences are almost not represented. This paper aims to provide a starting point to the research on the impact of conversational agents on humans in services. To accomplish this purpose, several questions are raised and hypotheses are formulated for the research community. The approach of the topic is conceptual. The need for this perspective was uncovered by means of a literature survey that answered the question: “Did researchers studied the impact of conversational agents on humans in services?†. The findings showed that researchers have not published yet such studies. The paper formulates research questions and hypotheses in four major domains in which conversational agents impact humans in services. These domains are: human capital of service companies, service customer behaviour towards conversational agents, service customer interviewing; decision-making in service companies. The questions and the hypotheses formulated in this paper provide potential directions for further research in the field of services. This paper is among the first to formulate questions and hypotheses related to the impact of conversational agents on humans in the field of services with the aim to serve further research.