Digital Human Effectiveness Approaching: Understanding Customer Commitment on Digital Human in e-Service from Utilitarian and Hedonic Perspectives

Abstract The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has made digital humans (DHs) an important interactive subject in the e-service system. Yet, current studies identified DHs are not as effective as people used to think. Combined with DHs acting as sociotechnical systems (STS), it is necessary to consider relationship management for DHs and customers in e-service. In order to address above concerns, this study uses the utilitarian and hedonic framework to investigate the construction mechanism of customer commitment (on DHs) in e-service. After 3 waves of data collection, a total of 703 questionnaires were collected. Multilevel modeling (MEM) and the response surface method (RSM) were used to analyze the data. The results demonstrate that customer commitment is constructed by a mixture of utilitarian and hedonic, in which the customer experience plays a mediating role in e-service. This study not only provides corresponding theoretical contributions to the study of DHs, customer commitments, and human‒machine relationships in e-service, but also has practical enlightenment significance for the construction of commercial scenarios like AI customer service and intelligent interaction systems.