Virtual Customer Service Agents: Using Social Presence and Personalization to Shape Online Service Encounters

By performing tasks traditionally fulfilled by service personnel in physical settings and having a humanlike appearance, virtual customer service agents seem to bring classical service personnel characteristics to the online service encounter, which in turn may elicit social responses and feelings of personalization. This paper sheds light on these dynamics by proposing and testing a nomological structure drawing upon the theories of implicit personality, social response, primitive emotional contagion, and social interaction. The focus of the proposed model is on the role of three classical service personnel characteristics – specifically friendliness, expertise, and smileas determinants of perceptions of social presence, personalization, and online service encounter satisfaction. An experimental design (n= 296) was applied to test the model. The key finding of the study is that friendliness and expertise strongly influence social presence and personalization, which in their turn lead to online service encounter satisfaction. Overall, the study highlights the value of transposing traditional service personnel characteristics via virtual customer service agents to the web, and underlines that integration between technology and personal aspects may lead to more social online service encounters.