When humanlike chatbots work for consumers--and when they don't

New research that I have conducted with my colleagues at the University of Oxford--Felipe Thomaz, Rhonda Hadi and Andrew Stephen--reveals that making chatbots more humanlike is a double-edged sword. On one hand, when customers are neutral, happy or even sad, interacting with humanized chatbots can boost customer satisfaction. Yet, when customers are angry, interacting with humanized chatbots only increases their dissatisfaction, meaning that a company's most unsatisfied customers are often handled the most poorly. More important, this lower satisfaction doesn't just affect the single chat interaction or the customer's feelings about the chatbot itself; it extends to negative feelings toward the entire company and decreases consumers' desire to purchase from that company in the future. Chatbots are becoming more common across a host of industries, as companies replace human customer-service agents on their websites, social-media pages and messaging services.