Towards Intelligent Chatbots for Customer Care - Practice-Based Requirements for a Research Agenda

Abstract

Chatbots bare a great potential to save efforts and costs in customer care through service automation. Current results are however still at an early stage in functionality and not widely attainable. Here, developing a new form of intelligent chatbots is a current challenge still under review. While there have been numerous proposals for future work, virtually all agenda-setting contributions are solely based on scientific literature. This is unsatisfactory from both an academic and practical perspective, as the industrial view on the future of chatbots seems to be neglected. Therefore, this work explores how professional experts see the future of intelligent chatbots for customer care and suggests how practice can guide research based on an expert panel with 17 industrial partners. Our work identifies research opportunities based on the demands and views of key practitioners by pin-pointing expected trends. Furthermore, based on the expert opinions, we derive guidelines for organizations which state key factors that should be considered in the development or adoption of chatbots in customer care.