Does using emojis in chatbots combined with social presence influence students’ intention to use in Ho Chi Minh City?

Abstract

As technology and customer age groups are gradually changing in parallel, whether businesses exist or not depends on how they reconcile two of these factors. And emojis (a part of youth language) combined with chatbots (a new technology trend) is an extremely potential method. This study helps show the benefits that this method brings. Applying the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm combined with Social Presence Theory to hypothesize the process of forming customers' intention to use chatbots. Using SmartPLS software combined with SPSS to analyze 213 survey samples, the results show that the effectiveness of chatbots using emoticons is higher than that of regular chatbots. Besides, social presence has an impact on users' intention to use chatbots through the intermediate factors of perceived competence, perceived warmth, trust, and service satisfaction. Although the results showed that perceived competence had no impact on service satisfaction and perceived warmth on intention to use chatbots, the effects among other factors are positive. Besides, research has found that in other contexts, feelings of warmth are not as valuable as feelings of chatbot competence. Therefore, we suggest future research directions to further analyze the emotional value of each emoticon and the role of more variables in customer psychology.