“Have a nice day:)”: Social interactions with customer service chatbots.

The use of chatbots in customer service is increasingly widespread. Although research investigating how users experience such chatbots exists, few studies have looked at how users actually interact with customer service chatbots. We lack knowledge on whether users participate in social interactions similar to what one would expect from a human-human interaction, or if they display different communication tactics. We carried out a study in which we asked 16 participants to interact with two customer service chatbots. The dialogues were then analysed to understand whether and how the users participated in social interaction. The results showed that most of the participants interact with chatbots in ways that resemble social interaction with humans, using full sentences as opposed to keywords, first and second person pronouns, and polite remarks. This shows that even highly task-oriented chatbots, such as chatbots for customer service, elicit various social responses from users and raises the question regarding whether one should design for social interaction with chatbots for customer service.