Liz Yingxue Zhao: ChatBot Duel: AI vs. Online Surveys
Being structured with open-ended questions and close-ended questions, online surveys have been deployed into the service practice to listen to the voices of customers effectively and inquire about their feedback to control the service quality. Chatbots, as an innovative tool to administrate surveys, can reinforce the performance of online surveys, such as lack of engagement, questionnaire design without interactivity, and survey fatigue, complexity, inconvenience, and respondents’ lack of diligence. Although this chatbot technology can potentially mitigate the impact of drawbacks of online surveys on response rate and the quality of survey response data, there is limited understanding from literature and real-world practice deployed by commercial firms on adapting this technology for the purpose. Furthermore, an urgent demand is to narrow the gap between theoretical discoveries and practical implementations by developing optimal and achievable strategies concerning the performance of chatbots in online surveys in marketing research. Therefore, by applying the seven characteristics of media richness theory to address the gap, this research contributes to the existing literature on artificial intelligence conversational marketing by unveiling the potential of chatbots as an innovative survey tool and provides empirical managerial implications for marketing practitioners regarding the role of chatbots in surveys to reinforce information elicitation in marketing.