[-Commerce Chatbot Conversations that Retain Customers: The Roles of Communication Quality and Language Style

초록

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots have been increasingly adopted in customer service across diverse industries. Prior research has demonstrated that language style significantly influences customer satisfaction, customer engagement, brand perceptions, and communicative impressions. Building on this foundation, the present study extends service communication theory by incorporating language style into the communication quality-trust-satisfaction-loyalty chain, thereby enriching existing theoretical models. To empirically test the proposed framework, an anonymous mobile survey was conducted between 15 August and 5 September 2025. A total of 826 valid responses were collected, with 411 in the formal language style group and 415 in the informal language style group. The results reveal that communication quality positively affects satisfaction, trust, and loyalty and that language style plays a pivotal role in shaping user perceptions. Furthermore, the moderating role of AI literacy is examined: its cognitive, usage, and evaluation dimensions significantly enhance communication quality, whereas its ethical dimension has no significant effect. This study contributes to the literature by uncovering the mechanisms linking communication quality, trust, satisfaction, and loyalty while highlighting the influence of language style and AI literacy. The findings offer practical design guidelines for configuring chatbot dialog and response strategies to improve user trust, satisfaction, and loyalty.

키워드