Chatbots versus human assistants in the online customer decision process

Each customer goes through a decision process when shopping online. It is up to the companies to offer touchpoints that connect them to the (potential) customer. Besides traditional phone hotlines, chats are becoming an increasingly popular method to make contact to customers. In these chats, some organizations are using bots (with artificial intelligence and natural language processing), some are using human assistants to chat with a (potential) customer. This research tries to investigate in which occasion (either pre-transaction, transaction, or post-transaction) which method (either a chatbot or an employee as a human assistant) is more satisfactory for the customer. It is important to note that besides the satisfaction of a customer, which this research focusses on, other factors such as operating costs should also be considered when deciding which service to offer.