When Communication Fails: Investigating the Effect of Behavioural Realism in Customer Care Avatars on Consumers’ Emotions, Cognition, and Performance Outcomes

Recent technological advancements have increased companies’ use of virtual human-like characters with anthropomorphic

appearances, called “avatars” for customer care. Responding to the increased use of such humanlike customer care avatars (CCA), this

project aims to investigate how and under which circumstances CCAs’ level of behavioural realism affects consumers’ emotions, cognition, and performance outcomes during consumer-CCA communication, with a particular focus on communication failure incidents, utilizing qualitative and quantitative investigations. Particularly, a systematic literature review and in-depth interviews for qualitative investigation, and a series of experimental studies for the quantitative investigation will be employed. The project takes an interdisciplinary perspective

by combining knowledge from marketing, technology, communication, and psychology. As such, this research is expected to

contribute novel knowledge to the customer-technology interface literature, which is an area that the Marketing Science Institute has

identified as one of the top research priorities for 2022. As experts estimate that the use of avatars will increase by 241% in the

hospitality and by 187% in the consumer goods industry, understanding customer-avatar interfaces is of utmost importance within

this research area. Moreover, this project is proposed in response to the European Union’s declaration of funding research and

innovation that supports Europe’s digital transformation with a new generation of technologies as one of the top priorities for

2019-2024.