Should Your Chatbot Joke? Driving Conversion Through the Humour of a Chatbot Greeting

Despite the increasing number of companies employing chatbots for tasks that previously needed human involvement, researchers and managers are only now beginning to examine chatbots in customer-brand relationship-building efforts. Not much is known, however, about how managers could modify their chatbot greeting, especially incorporating humour, to increase engagement and foster positive customer–brand interactions. The research aims to investigate how humour in a chatbot welcome message influences customers’ emotional attachment and conversion-to-lead through the mediating role of engagement. The findings of the experiment indicate that conversion-to-lead and emotional attachment rise when chatbots begin with a humorous (vs neutral) greeting. Engagement mediates this effect such that a humorous (vs neutral) greeting sparks engagement and thus makes users more emotionally attached and willing to give out their contact information to the brand. The study contributes to the existing research on chatbots, combining and expanding previous research on human–computer interaction and, more specifically, human–chatbot interaction, as well as the usage of humour in conversational marketing contexts. This study provides managers with insight into how chatbot greetings can engage consumers and convert them into leads

Chasing the Chatbots: Directions for Interaction and Design Research

Big tech-players have been successful in pushing the chatbots forward. Investments in the technology are growing fast, as well as the number of users and applications available. Instead of driving investments towards a successful diffusion of the technology, user-centred studies are currently chasing the popularity of chatbots. A literature analysis evidences how recent this research topic is, and the predominance of technical challenges rather than understanding users’ perceptions, expectations and contexts of use. Looking for answers to interaction and design questions raised in 2007, when the presence of clever computers in everyday life had been predicted for the year 2020, this paper presents a panorama of the recent literature, revealing gaps and pointing directions for further user-centred research

Social media content marketing : the case of Facebook in the South African telematics industry

Abstract: Social media have become interwoven with consumers’ everyday lives, altering the traditional ways in which consumers and brands interact. Despite the proliferating development of effective digital content as central to driving brand-consumer engagement, research suggests that there are uncertainties in the perceptions of companies about the value of the content they produce on the one hand, and those of its consumers on the other. This study specifically seeks to uncover this indistinctness by analysing the content that marketing professionals in this industry provide on social media platforms and consumers’ responses to that content..

Dynamic Capability Building through partnering: An Australian Mobile handset case Study

Dynamic capabilities are increasingly seen as an organisational characteristic for innovation and are regarded as a source of competitive advantage. In a quest for sustainability, service organisations are partnering with their stakeholders, and subsequently are aptly bringing innovation in services to market. Most of existing empirical research regarding dynamic capabilities seeks to define and identify specific dynamic capabilities, as well as their organizational antecedents or effects. Yet, the extent to which the antecedents of success in particular dynamic capabilities, contribute to innovation in service organisations remains less researched. This study advances the understanding of such dynamic capability building process through effective collaboration, and highlights the detailed mechanisms and processes of capability building within a service value network framework to deliver innovation in services. Deploying a case study methodology, transcribing interviews with managers and staff from an Australian telco and its partnering organisations, results show that collaboration, collaborative organisational learning, collaborative innovative capacity, entrepreneurial alertness and collaborative agility are all core to fostering innovation in services. Practical implications of this research are significant, and that the impacts of collaboration and the dynamic capabilities mentioned above are discussed in the context of a mobile handset case study

iRobot : conceptualising SERVBOT for humanoid social robots

Services are intangible in nature and, as a result, it is often difficult to measure the quality of the service. The service is usually delivered by a human to a human customer and the service literature shows SERVQUAL can be used to measure the quality of the service. However, the use of social robots during the pandemic is speeding up the process of employing social roots in frontline service settings. An extensive review of the literature shows there is a lack of an empirical model to assess the perceived service quality provided by a social robot. Furthermore, the social robot literature highlights key differences between human service and social robots. For example, scholars have highlighted the importance of entertainment and engagement in the adoption of social robots in the service industry. However, it is unclear whether the SERVQUAL dimensions are appropriate to measure social robots’ service quality. This master’s project will conceptualise the SERVBOT model to assess a social robot’s service quality. It identifies reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and entertainment as the five dimensions of SERVBOT. Further, the research will investigate how these five factors influence emotional and social engagement and intention to use the social robot in a concierge service setting. To conduct the research, a 2 x 1 (CONTROL vs SERVBOT) x (Concierge) between-subject experiment was undertaken and a total of 232 responses were collected for both stages. The results indicate that entertainment has a positive influence on emotional engagement when service is delivered by a human concierge. Further, assurance had a positive influence on social engagement when a human concierge provided the service. When a social robot concierge delivered the service, empathy and entertainment both influenced emotional engagement, and assurance and entertainment impacted social engagement favourably. For both CONTROL (human concierge) and SERVBOT (social robot concierge), emotional and social engagement had a significant influence on intentions to use. This study is the first to propose the SERVBOT model to measure social robots’ service quality. The model provides a theoretical underpinning on the key service quality dimensions of a social robot and gives scholars and managers a method to track the service quality of a social robot. The study also extends the literature by exploring the key factors that influence the use of social robots (i.e., emotional and social engagement)

Austerity policing, emotional labour and the boundaries of police work: an ethnography of a police force control room in England

This article discusses the changing role of policing in an era of austerity from the perspective of frontline civilian police staff (call handlers and dispatchers) in a force control room (FCR). It draws on a symbolic interactionist framework and the concept of emotional labour (Hochschild 1979; 1983[2012]) in order to explore the emotional responses and strategies engaged in by staff when responding to 101 non-emergency calls and 999 emergency calls. The clash of public and police expectations, and the emotional labour expended when managing this clash, provide a valuable insight into the frontline staff perspective on the changing role of the police under austerity. Data is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in the control room of a police force in England

A comparison of social media marketing between B2B, B2C and mixed business models

This paper explores the implicit assumption in the growing body of literature that social media usage is fundamentally different in business-to-business (B2B) companies than in the extant business-to-consumer (B2C) literature. Sashi’s (2012) customer engagement cycle is utilized to compare B2B, B2C, Mixed B2B/B2C and B2B2C business model organizational practices in relation to social media usage, importance, and its perceived effectiveness as a communication channel. Utilizing 449 responses to an exploratory panel based survey instrument, we clearly identify differences in social media marketing usage and its perceived importance as a communications channel. In particular we identify distinct differences in the relationship between social media importance and the perceived effectiveness of social media marketing across business models. Our results indicate that B2B social media usage is distinct from B2C, Mixed and B2B2C business model approaches. Specifically B2B organizational members perceive social media to have a lower overall effectiveness as a channel and identify it as less important for relationship oriented usage than other business models

Corporate social responsibility:reviewed, rated, revised

Purpose: Critical literature review of CSR research in both general management and hospitality management literature. Discusses trends,commonalities, and inconsistencies to better understand the state of contemporary scholarship, and calls for a context-specific conceptual engagement with the phenomenon.Design/Methodology/Approach: Systematic literature review, noting and critiquing a general tendency towards measurement of financial and other internal benefit impacts.Findings: Hospitality management is well-positioned to evaluate the opportunities and challenges of CSR, yet research has uncritically adopted the instrumental emphasis on assessing processes, perceptions, and private profitability from the general management literature, without engaging on a contextually-specific and/or theoretical level.Research limitations: CSR research is abundant and therefore difficult to summarise in one article.The primarily Anglo-American and Asian contextual bias is reflected in this review.Practical implications: Consistently inconsistent results challenge the portability of financial impact studies.Studies are needed to re-evaluate the concept of CSR as it pertains to hospitality, and measure the effectiveness of CSR activities relative to context and resource availability.Social implications: Further research into the scope of CSR in hospitality management, with an emphasis on recuperating social value, would lead to widespread positive social implications.Originality/value: This critical review offers a new perspective on CSR in the hospitality literature and industry, calling for a reconsideration of the concept in context, and formulates a working definition

Looking beneath the surface: how brands led to consumer engagement in social media

It is undeniable that the strong growth of social media and content generated in them is presented as a rising tide that came to stay! We are facing a change of structural nature, requiring brands to understand that shift and to adapt their strategies as they start looking at consumers as active partners, developing with them a close relationship, collaborative, deeply relational, reinforcing and strengthening the bond and an emotional connection. This fact led to an explosion of interest in consumer engagement. The opportunities presented by social media to help build close relationships with consumers seem to have attracted the increasing interest of practitioners in a wide variety of industries worldwide. Academic scholarship consumer engagement, however, has lagged practice and its theoretical foundation is relatively underdeveloped and a better understanding of the concept and their drivers is essential to develop accurate strategies. This paper seeks to address some of these issues. From the universe of brands, two popular fashion brands (Cubanas and Paez) were selected, based on RankUPT [1], a statistics website aimed at the analysis of Facebook’s activity in Portugal that makes a daily measurement of homepages, based on the number of fans. A qualitative netnographic study was conducted, through a non-interventionist observational technique, added with a collection of qualitative behavioral data which took place between March and December 2015, and also considering the use of secondary data for the descriptive analysis of the brands in question. Metrics used for measuring engagement were the most commonly used in other studies (e.g., likes, sharing, commenting), along with the de Vries, Gensler and Leeflang [2], Cvijiki and Michaheles [3], and Malhotra, Malhotra and See [4], criteria for the drivers of engagement. The results are discussed and the academic and business implications of the study are examined, in particular for branding and relationship marketing.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio