To main content

Understanding how chatbots work: An exploratory study of mental models in customer service chatbots.

Abstract

Chatbots are changing customer service interactions, enabling higher reliance on self-serving behavior.
There seems to be an emphasis on designing these chatbots to be as humanlike as possible. One drawback
is that such humanlike design might lead users to apply the same mental models when interacting with
chatbots as they do when interacting with human customer service personnel. Arguably, this may cause
issues in the chatbot interaction because the technology may not be capable of handling interactions at the
same level of sophistication as human personnel. Thus, the mental models that users apply are important
for successful system interactions, but little research have been dedicated towards understanding these
mental models. To close this research gap, we asked 16 users to interact with two customer service chatbots
to explore the mental models guiding their interactions. Based on qualitative interviews and
screen-captured videos of the participants’ dialogues, an exploratory analysis indicated that the participants
drew on two types of mental models to understand, predict, and interact with chatbots: a human-oriented
model and a technology-oriented model. We discuss our findings and their theoretical and practical
implications.

Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Sustainable Communication Technologies
  • University of Oslo

Year

2021

Published in

IADIS International Journal on WWW/Internet

ISSN

1645-7641

Volume

19

Issue

1

Page(s)

17 - 36

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository