AI customer service: Task complexity, problem-solving ability, and usage intention (original) (raw)

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of customer service, we define as a technology-enabled system for evaluating real-time service scenarios using data collected from digital and/or physical sources in order to provide personalised recommendations, alternatives, and solutions to customers' enquiries or problems, even very complex ones. We examined, in a banking services context, whether consumers preferred AI or Human online customer service applications using an experimental design across three field-based experiments. The results show that, in the case of low-complexity tasks, consumers considered the problem-solving ability of AI to be greater than that of human customer service and were more likely to use AI while, conversely, for high-complexity tasks, they viewed human customer service as superior and were more likely to use it than AI. Moreover, we found that perceived problem-solving ability mediated the effects of customers' service usage intentions (i.e., t...