Customer perspectives on the process of co-creation with chatbots

Abstract

Chatbot use is becoming increasingly prevalent in service industries, as chatbots are being deployed as a first point of contact for many customer service enquiries (Sheehan et al., 2020). As a result, customers may feel that they are required to interact with a chatbot, especially if they perceive that they do not have the choice to speak to a human representative instead (Forrester, 2017). The academic literature has interpreted interactions between customers and AI applications, such as chatbots, using a co-creation lens (e.g. Lalicic & Weismayer, 2021; Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2018). In this context, the interaction between multiple active actors, that is, the chatbot and the customer, is viewed as resulting in the generation of value beyond which each actor can achieve independently (Neghina et al., 2015). At the core of co-creation is communication and joint collaboration (Lusch et al., 2007), as well as a process of resource integration, which specifies that actors need to apply and integrate a range of resources for value co-creation to be activated (Kleinaltenkamp et al., 2012). Value co-creation is a suitable lens to explore customer-chatbot interaction, because it moves beyond producer-to-consumer relationships, and instead emphasizes actor-to-actor networks that create value for each other (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). However, whereas service encounters traditionally took place between human actors, new human-to-non-human interactions, add an uncharted dimension to the study of actor-to-actor networks in value co-creation (Belanche et al., 2020; Kaartemo & Helkkula, 2018). The utilisation of AI in service promises value co-creation that changes as the AI adapts to other actors (such as customers), and these actors then adapt to the AI. Although academic literature increasingly relies on the co-creation lens to explore customer-chatbot relationships, there is a lack of understanding regarding the way that customers, specifically, perceive the co-creation process when interacting with chatbots. The aim of this study is therefore to understand and map out the process of co-creation that customers perceive when interacting with AI chatbots.