Expect more work when your chatbot says a human may help

Cerulean Warbler, a plate from John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827-1838).

When customers learn that a human may read the chat, they write to the human, not to the bot.

The study. Ulrich Gnewuch and 4 co-authors ran a field experiment on the website chat of a multinational telecom company. A chatbot called "Lisa" answered customers, and human staff could step in. The researchers told 8,966 customers about the human help in different ways, at random.

The finding. When the chatbot said at the start that humans also help, customers wrote about 23% more words per message. With both types of disclosure, staff sent 1.26 responses per chat, against 0.74 with no disclosure. The authors estimate that disclosure raised the cost of human help by 38% to 70%.

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