Let’s Team Up with AI! Toward a Hybrid Intelligence System for Online Customer Service

Abstract

Customers desire convenient, fast, and personalized service encounters. Hence, service companies deploy self-service technology for online customer service. However, as solutions based on Artificial Intelligence cannot reliably answer the full range of requests and the demands on service employees (SEs) in live chat interaction are high, Hybrid Intelligence Systems (HIS) provide great potential to overcome current pitfalls by combining the complementary strengths of artificial and human intelligence. To ensure optimal performance of this socio-technical ensemble, human-centered design approaches are needed to realize real-time augmentation of decision-making in chat-based service encounters. Following a Design Science Research approach, we generate theory-based design principles (DPs) and implement them in a web-based HIS prototype. We contribute to Hybrid Intelligence research with results showing that the DPs enable task mastery and decision efficiency and provide avenues for future research.