Chatbot interactions: How consumption values and disruptive situations influence customers' willingness to interact

Chatbots offer customers access to personalised services and reduce costs for organisations. While some customers initially resisted interacting with chatbots, the COVID-19 outbreak caused them to reconsider. Motivated by this observation, we explore how disruptive situations, such as the COVID-19 outbreak, stimulate customers' willingness to interact with chatbots. Drawing on the theory of consumption values, we employed interviews to identify emotional, epistemic, functional, and social values that potentially shape willingness to interact with chatbots. Findings point to six values and suggest that disruptive situations stimulate how the values influence WTI with chatbots. Following theoretical insights that values collectively contribute to behaviour, we set up a scenario-based study and employed a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. We show that customers who experience all values are willing to interact with chatbots, and those who experience none are not, irrespective of disruptive situations. We show that disruptive situations stimulate the willingness to interact with chatbots among customers with configurations of values that would otherwise not have been sufficient. We complement the picture of relevant values for technology interaction by highlighting the epistemic value of curiosity as an important driver of willingness to interact with chatbots. In doing so, we offer a configurational perspective that explains how disruptive situations stimulate technology interaction.