Journal
JOURNAL OF RETAILING AND CONSUMER SERVICES
Volume 53, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2019.102001
Keywords
Self-disclosure; Service encounters; Customer satisfaction; Virtual agents; Artificial intelligence
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In the service encounter, the employee must often encourage customer self-disclosure (i.e., revealing of personal information) to be able to match the customer's needs with what the firm has to offer. This study uses an experimental approach to manipulate employee encouragement of self-disclosure (low vs. high) to explore its impact on the customer. It was found that encouraging self-disclosure enhanced customer perceptions of customization, employee effort, own effort, privacy concerns, and employee humanness, and that these responses influenced customer satisfaction. In addition, because many firms are beginning to replace human employees with various forms of virtual agents (and it has been argued that we humans may find it less threatening to self-disclose to such agents), the identity of the employee (virtual agent vs. human employee) was manipulated, too. The identity factor, however, did not influence customers' responses.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available