Exploring the Role of Human and Digital Interactions in Online Customer Support: An Abstract

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to explore how human and digital interactions online can enhance customer-organisation relationships through driving a change in customers’ cognitive and affective evaluations and behaviours. Process of digitalisation has changed consumers’ behaviours considerably through integration of digital technology in nearly every aspect of consumers’ life (Zeithaml et al. 2006). Hence, organisations have recognised the importance of delivering high-quality and efficient interactions as a distinguishing factor to achieve competitive advantage and build relationships with consumers (Lemon and Verhoef 2016). Accordingly, throughout the literature, there have been a number of conceptual papers debating the role of digital technologies and human employees (Bowen 2016; Larivière et al. 2017; Robinson et al. 2019; De Keyser et al. 2019). For instance, Shankar (2018) argues that service employees will work in tandem with digital technologies, whereas Huang and Rust (2020) debate that once technology develops empathy, service jobs will disappear. Throughout literature, it can be seen that the research in a field of technology, social presence, service employees, and consumer behaviour is fragmented. There is no unified framework that would explain how digital and human interactions affect a change in cognitive and affective evaluations and behaviours. Following technology adoption framework and theory of social presence, there is little evidence on whenever social presence conveyed through human and digital characteristics' influence a change in consumers’ cognitive and affective evaluations and behaviours (Short et al. 1976; Hassanein and Head 2007; McLean et al. 2020). Thus, building upon TAM and behavioural theories, this research aims to make a novel contribution and develop a framework that would explain how interactions with human and digital during service encounters affect behavioural responses towards a firm. Hereafter, this research addresses the theoretical knowledge gap by investigating how interactions with digital technology, particularly virtual agent (artificial intelligence), and service employee impact consumer behaviour. Hence, it is suggested to conduct an experiment under two motivational conditions and manipulate level of empathy and responsiveness of customer service agents. This will help to determine how human and digital characteristics can enhance social presence which in turn will affect customers’ cognitive, affective and behavioural responses towards a firm. By closing this gap, it will add to existing knowledge on technology adoption and social presence theory and will help to understand how organisations can achieve competitive advantage and build relationships with consumers through balancing digital and human interactions within service encounters (Bolton et al. 2018; Verhoef et al. 2019).