Advances in Human-AI Collaboration

12AI Chat-Based Customer Services and Systems

Qin Gao and Jinhan Zhang

Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

12.1 Introduction

High-quality customer service is of paramount importance to customers’ satisfaction, trust, engagement, and loyalty (Setó-Pamies, 2012). Direct contact between a customer and a service provider is considered a critical point, or “moment of truth,” in service experience (Vasconcelos et al., 2015). Over the past decade, such interaction has become increasingly technology-empowered. In particular, chatbots—machine agents that communicate with users through natural language (Følstad & Brandtzaeg, 2020)—have gained prominence in customer service setting, as they provide a 24/7 available customer support channel with dialog features resembling human interaction at relatively low cost (Følstad & Skjuve, 2019). Driven by advancements in natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and deep learning, particularly the recent surge of generative models like generative pre-trained transformer 4 (GPT-4), the market size of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.3% from 2023 to 2028, to reach approximately $15.5 billion in 2028¹. In addition, the use of customer service chatbots has spurred interest in a variety of domains, including e-commerce, marketing, education, tourism, and public administration.

This increase in popularity can be owed to the benefits for both ...