{"title":"When AI takes your call: Investigating the impact of conversational styles on customer service agents’ affective delivery","authors":"Inyoung Jang , Jaekwang Kim , Inyoung Park","doi":"10.1016/j.tele.2025.102277","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Designing systems for proper conversation is one of the main challenges in developing affective artificial intelligence such as AI customer service agents (CSAs). While service interaction studies underscore that CSA’s sincerity plays a key role in affective service delivery, there is limited research on how people perceive sincerity from non-human AI CSAs. By simulating real voice-based customer service interactions, our study presented a research model to examine how the conversational styles (task-oriented vs. emotion-oriented) influence individual’s perceived sincerity and affective delivery of AI CSAs. Results indicate that the conversational styles and CSA type (human vs. AI) jointly influenced perceived sincerity. Further, perceived sincerity mediated the interaction effect between CSA type and conversational style on perceived affective delivery. This paper advances the existing literature on affective delivery of AI by elucidating how different conversation designs can enhance customer perceptions in voice-mediated AI communications.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48257,"journal":{"name":"Telematics and Informatics","volume":"99 ","pages":"Article 102277"},"PeriodicalIF":7.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Telematics and Informatics","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585325000395","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Designing systems for proper conversation is one of the main challenges in developing affective artificial intelligence such as AI customer service agents (CSAs). While service interaction studies underscore that CSA’s sincerity plays a key role in affective service delivery, there is limited research on how people perceive sincerity from non-human AI CSAs. By simulating real voice-based customer service interactions, our study presented a research model to examine how the conversational styles (task-oriented vs. emotion-oriented) influence individual’s perceived sincerity and affective delivery of AI CSAs. Results indicate that the conversational styles and CSA type (human vs. AI) jointly influenced perceived sincerity. Further, perceived sincerity mediated the interaction effect between CSA type and conversational style on perceived affective delivery. This paper advances the existing literature on affective delivery of AI by elucidating how different conversation designs can enhance customer perceptions in voice-mediated AI communications.
期刊介绍:
Telematics and Informatics is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes cutting-edge theoretical and methodological research exploring the social, economic, geographic, political, and cultural impacts of digital technologies. It covers various application areas, such as smart cities, sensors, information fusion, digital society, IoT, cyber-physical technologies, privacy, knowledge management, distributed work, emergency response, mobile communications, health informatics, social media's psychosocial effects, ICT for sustainable development, blockchain, e-commerce, and e-government.