A Review and Prospects of Customer Behavior under AI Service

Du Jiangang; Zhao Huan; Su Jiuru; Zhang Yu

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20211017.101

Summary

The new generation of AI is being widely used in the service industry, and has a profound impact on service consumption and service economy. AI service runs through the entire service experience of consumers, not only changing the existing service interface and interaction methods, but also impacting consumers’ psychological perception and satisfaction. This process has also impacted and even subverted the traditional service marketing theory.

This paper systematically sorts out the literature concerning AI service in the current service marketing research. First of all, in order to explore what is AI service, this paper organizes the connotation of AI in the service field. On this basis, we put forward the definition of AI service. At the same time, the current mainstream research directions are expounded from the two dimensions of negative factors affecting the application of AI, such as the neglect of uniqueness, and positive factors, such as ease of use.

Secondly, this paper reviews the existing literature with the logic of independent variables, mediating variables, outcome variables and moderator variables, and sorts out the AI attributes that may affect consumers’ attitudes and behaviors in service interaction, such as appearance, image, etc., the corresponding psychological mechanism, such as perceptual control, trust, etc., as well as outcome variables such as consumer acceptance and moderating variables such as technology acceptance.

Finally, this paper discusses the possible changes in the traditional theory of service marketing in the context of AI, and puts forward some conclusions that the tangible characteristic of AI will weaken the intangibility of service, and the reliability, responsiveness and tangibility of AI service quality will improve, while security and empathy will decline, as well as some thoughts, such as whether there can be emotional contagion between machine and human, and whether AI service will bring higher service commitment, etc. These will provide new ideas for the research of AI service.

The contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, most of existing studies review the literature based on theory, while this paper sorts out the variables with the logic of the theoretical model. The system framework is more complete, and the variables are clearer and more comprehensive. Secondly, the introduction of AI has changed the underlying logic of service marketing, but existing studies pay less attention. This paper considers the traditional service marketing theory, discusses its possible changes, provides directions for future research, and ultimately promotes the better application of AI service in practice.