Fun or warm: How conversational style boosts customer engagement

Abstract

This research proposes and shows that a fun conversational style fosters greater tourist engagement than chatbots' traditional warm conversational style in a hotel room booking context. Furthermore, successful technology adoption requires businesses to understand the influence of cultural factors. Specifically, comprehending how individualism, a key cultural factor, shapes the effectiveness of chatbot conversation styles is important to enhance tourist engagement. Our findings, across two studies employing a combination of online surveys (Study 1, n = 241) and a randomised between-subject experiment (Study 2, n = 113), demonstrate that tourists' individualism serves as a boundary condition for the relationship between chatbot conversation styles and engagement. Additionally, results show that a fun chatbot conversation style increases customer engagement through underlying mechanisms of consumer's sense of liberation and hedonic involvement. Our research contributes to the psychological theory of fun and literature related to customer engagement. From a practical standpoint, this research offers valuable insights into the effectiveness of chatbot conversations that resonate with the needs of tourists while booking a hotel room. Marketing firms should deploy fun chatbots that stimulate customers' attention, interest, arousal, and curiosity through enjoyable experiences to foster customer engagement.