How to Convey Resilience: Towards A Taxonomy for Conversational Agent Breakdown Recovery Strategies

Conversational agents (CAs) have permeated our everyday lives in the past decade. Yet, the CAs we encounter today are far from perfect as they are still prone to breakdowns. Studies have shown that breakdowns have an immense impact on the user-CA relationship, user satisfaction, and retention. Therefore, it is important to investigate how to react and recover from breakdowns appropriately so that failures do not impair the CA experience lastingly. Examples for recovery strategies are the assumption of the most likely user intent (CA self-repair) or to ask for clarification (user-repair). In this paper, we iteratively develop a taxonomy to classify breakdown recovery strategies based on studies from scholarly literature and experiements with productive CA instances, and identify the current best practices described using our taxonomy. We aim to synthesize, structure and further the knowledge on breakdown handling and to provide a common language to describe recovery strategies

My Virtual Colleague: A State-of-the-Art Analysis of Conversational Agents for the Workplace

Conversational interfaces at the workplace are not a new idea, but it is only the recent technological advancements that turned what was once a vision into near-future reality. Improved reliability and accuracy enable conversational systems to be used in higher stake environments, such as the workplace. In this work, we perform a literature review on concepts proposed to incorporate Conversational Agents (CA) into the workplace. We found 29 workplace CAs designed for workers that contribute to eight different application domains. Based on the studies of these CAs, we compiled a list of aspects to be considered when designing such CAs and identified starting points for further research

Designing Chatbots for Workplace Learning

Technological advancements cause jobs to constantly change. In order to keep up, workers need to upskill themselves to stay employable. In today\u27s jungle of learning opportunities, it is not easy to find their way. We propose to use a chatbot as a virtual coach to help information workers cope with this challenge and to support their personal development. Compared to human coaches, a chatbot is cost-efficient, highly scalable, time- and location-independent. In this work, we use Design Science Research to develop a chatbot prototype, which we evaluate in an interview study. Eventually, we identify eight starting points for further research and development

How to Drive Digital Transformation in a Pandemic and Beyond: Learnings from COVID-19 Crisis

The lockdown induced by the COVID-19 pandemic had a massive impact on the global economy forcing many organizations to allocate employees in home-office, reduce operations or promptly rethink their business models and adapt to the new realities. Digital tools and processes rapidly emerged to facilitate virtual communication, remote work and digital sales. This sudden pressure for digital transformation (DT) and adaptation to the new circumstances urge for the assessment of DT constructs related to the disruptive nature of this pandemic. We attempt to advance our understanding of the relationship between the DT in organizations and the COVID-19 pandemic. By conducting a qualitative interview study with representatives from German organizations, we were able to determine the changes in the drivers of DT in current times, as well as new factors that arise due to the special lockdown circumstances. We present our results and their scholarly and practical implications

The Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Digital Transformation in German Organizations

COVID-19 has struck the world unexpectedly in 2020. The first lockdown created an unprecedented situation, in which interpersonal contact is reduced to only the most inevitable encounters. An immense need for digitalization emerged in all areas, such as education, working from home and digital sales channels. Meanwhile, organizations struggled to finance the sudden call for digital transformation (DT), when traditional streams of income broke down. In this study, we aim to investigate the impact of the first lockdown on the drivers of DT. How did German organizations react and what can we learn from this crisis for the long term? In order to answer this question, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the influencing factors on DT and conduct an interview study with digital experts from different German organizations. This research in progress paper reports on the findings of the SLR and preliminary results of the following study