Virtual assistants: Trust and adoption in telecommunication customer support

Abstract

Virtual Assistants have been used to deliver question and answer support or as website navigation aids but there is little research on their effectiveness in this or other online commercial roles. This study aimed to address that gap by investigating if trust and likely adoption of a telecommunication network switching experience are significantly higher when mediated by a virtual assistant. The experiment replicated a traditional online form and created an alternative version mediated by an interactive chat bot. It used mixed methods; a usability test followed by a within group online experiment completed by 103 participants. The online experiment failed to support the hypotheses. Some interesting findings on usability, deployment strategy and future research are uncovered and discussed.