Investigating Drivers of Customer Experience with Virtual Conversational Agents

Building on the perspectives of the uses & gratification (U&G) theory and stimulus-organism-response (S–O-R) model, this article develops and tests an integrative framework to examine the underlying factors influencing customers’ experiences with chatbots as a form of virtual conversational agent (VCA) in the UK and Vietnam. In addition to utilitarian and hedonic factors, anthropomorphism and social presence are also investigated, which are considered important experiential dimensions in a customer-machine relationship. We also explore how stimuli such as functionality, communication style similarity, and aesthetics indirectly affect outcomes like customer satisfaction and reuse intention, mediated by four types of customer experiences. Data collected from a sample of 417 and 359 participants in the UK and Vietnam respectively revealed that, in general, perceived informativeness, credibility, enjoyment, functionality, and communication style similarity are crucial for customer satisfaction in both countries. Interesting differences in the effects of customer experience between developed and developing countries were observed. For instance, the effects of anthropomorphism and social presence on satisfaction are only effective for customers from developed country, while those from developing country only need information provided by chatbots be transparent. Our findings offer a novel way to understand customer experience with chatbots and provide important theoretical and managerial implications.