Enhancing customer satisfaction with chatbots: The influence of communication styles and consumer attachment anxiety

Chatbots are increasingly occupying the online retailing landscape, and the volume of consumer-chatbot service interactions is exploding. Even so, it still remains unclear how chatbots should communicate with consumers to ensure positive customer service experiences and, in particular, to improve their satisfaction. A fundamental decision in this regard is the choice of a communication style, specifically, whether a social-oriented or a task-oriented communication style should be best used for chatbots. In this paper, we investigate how using a social-oriented versus task-oriented communication style can improve customer satisfaction. Two experimental studies reveal that using a social-oriented communication style boosts customer satisfaction. Warmth perception of the chatbot mediates this effect, while consumer attachment anxiety moderates these effects. Our results indicate that social-oriented communication style can be beneficial in enhancing service satisfaction for highly anxiously attached customers, but it does not work for the lowly anxiously attached. This study provides theoretical and practical implications about how to implement chatbots in service encounters.