Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The research aims to provide companies knowledge of (1) why customers use the chat feature, (2) who – the agent or the bot – is more similar (in content) to the customer and (3) whether and how this similarity impacts the customer’s engagement during the chat. Design/methodology/approach I conducted three analyses, each of which uses machine learning. Findings Analysis 1 reveals that customers prefer chatting with an agent (vs. the bot) when they seek detailed or sensitive information. Analysis 2 demonstrates that relative to the bot, the agent is more similar (in content) to the customer. Analysis 3 uses guided latent Dirichlet allocation and gradient boosting (XGBoost) to show that matching the customer on the dominant topic boosts customer engagement during the chat. Research limitations/implications The findings help academics know why customers choose an agent versus a bot and whether this choice helps or hurts their engagement. Practical implications The findings help retail managers design better chat features and chatbots, thus improving customer engagement. Originality/value I am aware of no research in marketing or business that has provided evidence on customers’ choice of agent versus bot and the engagement consequences of this choice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".