Impact of Knowledge and Electronic Word of Mouth About AI-Based Chatbots on Customers' Intention to Continue Using Chatbots in E-Commerce

The admiration of e-commerce businesses has been climbing fast, and e-commerce businesses are competing with each other to increase their market share. Here, the chatbot is playing an important role for e-commerce to communicate with customers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to explain the way the constructs of TPB impact customers’ intentions to continue using chatbots (ICUC), which also impacts the number of loyal customers in e-commerce. This study used primary data from 510 participants residing in the USA who have prior experience interacting with chatbots. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the relationship between TPB contracts and behavioral intention. The findings indicated that all three TPB constructs had a significant impact on the customer’s ICUC (p < .01), with the model explaining 48.3% of the variance in ICUC (R2 = 0.483). ICUC also impacts loyal customers in e-commerce. Moreover, knowledge about AI-based chatbots and electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) have significant impacts on TPB constructs and ICUC. The theoretical contribution of this study has shown the use of the TPB model in AI-based chatbots and the way it is linked to customer loyalty in e-commerce. In addition, this study suggested to the e-commerce managers that they can use AI-based chatbots to communicate with customers in order to gain a large number of loyal customers.