Communicating Service Offers in a Conversational User Interface: An Exploratory Study of User Preferences in Chatbot Interaction

The increased interest in chatbots accentuates the importance of conversational design. A key conversational design challenge concerns how to communicate available service offers to users. We present an exploratory study, conducted in the context of financial service provision. Here, we first detailed four alternative approaches to communicate available service offers, reflecting different levels of proactivity. We then gathered feedback on user preference through interviews with 17 users following their interactions with prototypes representing the four approaches. Proactivity in the communication of service offers was found to be potentially valuable, provided that the offer is relevant to the conversation, do not compromise conversational efficiency, and is easy to discard. However, proactive communication of service offers may also entail challenges concerning perceptions of privacy and invasiveness, and, hence, needs to be designed with great care. Based on our findings, we summarize implications for theory and practice and propose directions for future research.