Change in digital business : Chatbots and their significance on online purchasing

The world of business is constantly changing, the trend is currently on online business. However, whatever the trend is, support is always necessary. The kind of support which fits best with the current business format, is support through chatbots. As the number of e-business customers needing support has reached a level that human support for every customer is not possible anymore. As the usage of chatbots in online business is fairly new, improvements are still necessary. One of those improvements is the ability to create more humanlike chatbots. The variables Competence and Empathy, relating to chatbot humanness, were compared to the variable Likability, this in turn was compared to Consideration. The analysis showed that these comparisons showed for positive causal relationships. This enables future research regarding chatbots for further development of its human traits and supports theories regarding anthropomorphism chatbots.