Search results

Service research offering a view of both the dark and bright sides of smart technology remains scarce. This paper embraces a critical perspective and examines the conflicting outcomes of smart services on the customer experience (CX), with a specific focus on chatbots.

This study uses empirical research methods to examine a single case study where an online retail service provider implemented a chatbot for customer service. Using discourse analysis, we analysed 7,167 conversations between customers and the chatbot over a two-year period.

The analysis identifies seven general themes related to the effects of the chatbot on CX: interaction quality, information gathering, procedure literacy, task achievement, digital trust, shopping stress and shopping journey. We illuminate both positive (i.e. having a pleasant interaction, providing information, knowing procedures, improving tasks, increasing trust, reducing stress and completing the journey) and negative outcomes (i.e. having an unpleasant interaction, increasing confusion, ignoring procedures, worsening tasks, reducing trust, increasing stress and abandoning the journey).

The paper develops a comprehensive framework to offer a clearer view of chatbots as smart services in customer care. It delves into the conflicting effects of chatbots on CX by examining them through relational, cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions.

This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social accountability movements; specifically, the anti-inequality/anti-corporate #OccupyWallStreet conversation stream on Twitter.

A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach as well as XGBoost machine learning algorithms are applied to a dataset of 9.2 million #OccupyWallStreet tweets in order to analyze not only how the speech patterns of bots differ from other participants but also how bot participation impacts the trajectory of the aggregate social accountability conversation stream. The authors consider two research questions: (1) do bots speak differently than non-bots and (2) does bot participation influence the conversation stream.

The results indicate that bots do speak differently than non-bots and that bots exert both weak form and strong form influence. Bots also steadily become more prevalent. At the same time, the results show that bots also learn from and adapt their speaking patterns to emphasize the topics that are important to non-bots and that non-bots continue to speak about their initial topics.

These findings help improve understanding of the consequences of bot participation within social media-based democratic dialogic processes. The analyses also raise important questions about the increasing importance of apparently nonhuman actors within different spheres of social life.

The current study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, that uses a theoretically informed Big Data approach to simultaneously consider the micro details and aggregate consequences of bot participation within social media-based dialogic social accountability processes.

In this study, the authors develop knowledge and insights on how the perception of interestingness influences the structure and focus of conversations in entrepreneurial education (EE) research. In particular, the authors elaborate on what is perceived as interesting among different subgroups of EE researchers, and not least, how EE researchers can identify and engage in scholarly conversation within the field.

The study is based on a unique database with web-based responses from 465 EE researchers from around the world. The authors conduct analyses of both open-ended and closed questions. The open-ended questions are analyzed by inductive categorization. The closed questions are subject to factor and cluster analyses.

The findings suggest that EE research is a topic-oriented field, characterized by a strong focus on novel and challenging research issues. In addition, the field is individualistic and fragmented, and the perception of interestingness differs between five subgroups of EE researchers, whose members have a somewhat different perception of interestingness. Accordingly, the authors also find different core conversations going on within the field. Obviously, these conversations tend to be triggered by the field's obsession with novelty and challenging research, but several conversations are related to practically relevant research, as well as methodological and theoretical discussions.

This is the first study to elaborate on the perception of interestingness among EE researchers and the conversations going on within the field. In the study the authors have explored the characteristics of EE research based on the perception of interestingness among the researchers within the field. In this respect, this study contributes insights on how current and aspiring EE researchers can find and build scholarly conversations embedded in passionate interest, while concurrently disseminating and accumulating knowledge on EE together with like-minded peers.

This paper investigates the ways managing directors (MDs) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involve employees in strategic conversations. The paper examines how managers interact with employees in strategic conversations, and why the managers do so (or do not), to generate empirically grounded knowledge about the nature of internal openness in SMEs.

This study employs a general inductive approach and is based on in-depth interviews with 60 Swedish MDs with development and growth ambitions.

The paper develops a model of employee involvement in strategic conversations based on the nature and intensity of the MD–employee interaction. A key finding is that SMEs exhibit wide variation in terms of employee involvement, from virtually no employee involvement to, in some cases, far-reaching company democracy. The reasons for this variation are complex, but personal preferences and company size are shown to have an impact, as does, to some degree, ownership structure. In contrast to existing research, the limitations and drawbacks of involving employees in strategic conversations are outlined.

The study provides important insight into MDs' views and practices of internal openness in strategic conversations in SMEs. A model of employee involvement in strategic processes is outlined, and potential limitations of internal openness are highlighted.

Currently, online chat is in common use in e-commerce. By adding social interaction to the online context, companies hope to increase customers’ purchasing intentions. However, previous studies have not investigated how social presence is embedded in online business-to-business (B2B) chat conversations between buyers and sellers. Moreover, the functions of online chat in B2B sales have not been investigated.

The data was collected at a case company over the course of four years, from which the authors analyzed 157 online chat conversations between buyers (n = 157) and sellers (n = 9) with a theory-driven thematic analysis. In addition, data from the company’s customer relationship management system was collected to specify buyer types.

The results reveal that social presence was embedded in online B2B chat via buyers’ interactive, affective and relationship maintenance responses. Social presence differed depending on the type of buyer, with only existing customers having relationship maintenance responses. E-commerce B2B chat functions can be described as multiple and changing depending on the buyer–seller relationship stage.

Having data only from one case company limits the results to one type of industry.

The results can be used in sales training and when developing online chat services.

Results bring scientific utility to B2B sales and marketing research, as the authors build a bridge between social presence, the existing theoretical model on B2B buyer–seller relationship development and online chat as a communication medium. Other researchers may use this understanding when exploring B2B buyer–seller interaction in different digitalized communication media.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate practices of argumentation on Twitter discussions about climate change.

Conversational threads were collected from the Twitter API. Fundamental concepts from argumentation theory and linking practices were operationalised through a coding schema for content analysis. Tweets were analysed in the context of the discussions and coded according to their argumentative approach, interaction type and argumentation stage. Linked and embedded sources were analysed in order to find how they were used in arguments, the plausibility and soundness of the message, the consistency and trustworthiness of the linked source and its adequacy with the target audience.

Among the interactions between arguers, this study found five typical practices and several patterns involving the dynamics of the conversations, the strategy of the argumentation and the linking practices. Although the rhetorical approach was prominent, the agreement was rarely achieved. The arguers used a variety of sources to justify or support their positions, often embedding non-textual content. These linking practices, together with the strategy adopted and the topics discussed, suggest the involvement of a multiple audience engaged in discussing ad lib scientific artefacts, topics and outputs.

While Twitter has been the focus for many research papers, the conversational threads have been given little attention so far. With the Twitter API making conversations more accessible for research, this paper does not only give insight into multiple audience group argumentation dynamics but also provides a method to study the conversations from an argumentation theory perspective.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

This study aims to analyze whether companies from six Latin American countries are encouraging dialogic communication on Facebook.

To do so, the paper studied the level of predisposition for interaction and the type of interaction achieved by companies on Facebook to produce an effective dialogic communication exchange and to generate conversation through different types of communication exchange between organizations and users. This research includes a specific analysis of the active presence, interactive attitude, interactive resources, responsiveness and conversation of 29,078 posts on 135 corporate fanpages of companies from six Latin American countries.

The results show that companies have a low interest in managing communication from a dialogic perspective on the social network, not only because a greater predisposition to interaction is needed, but also because the interaction generated is very low. Therefore, the paper identifies the need to review the communication strategy on social networks and to define a strategy aligned to the dialogic nature of the social network.

This research contributes to broadening the conceptual reflection on the evaluation of the dialogue in the digital context and aims to generate new methodological contributions to the evaluation of dialogic communication in an integrated way.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the “audience exchange” approach for audience development and research, and to highlight the insights offered by peer-to-peer dialogue in understanding experiences of unfamiliar arts.

Using a case study with contemporary arts audiences, and setting this in the wider context of studies with other first-time attenders at a range of arts events, the paper explores the use of the “audience exchange” method, in which facilitated conversations after performance events allow newcomers to reflect upon and deepen their first-time encounters with live arts.

The study demonstrates the way in which conversations about arts events can enrich audience experience, and shows how participants use exploratory and emotional language to articulate their understanding of unfamiliar arts events. Peer-to-peer learning occurs through these conversations, in ways that could be further supported by arts organisations as a valuable tool for audience development. The audience exchange discussions also reveal the varieties of participation from “drifting” to full attention that are all part of audience engagement.

This is a small-scale, qualitative study, and the method has potential to be tested in future studies with a greater variety of participants (e.g. younger or more ethnically diverse groups).

Use of the audience exchange for enriching experiences of first-time attendance could be adopted by arts organisations as a regular part of their audience engagement. Greater understanding of how new audience members draw on prior cultural experiences in finding the language to articulate their first impressions of an unfamiliar arts event could be valuable for targeted marketing and increasing accessibility.

The originality of this study lies in its elaboration of the audience exchange method, and its focus on the language and peer-to-peer learning evident in the facilitated post-performance discussions.