Clarification Design for E-Commerce Service Chatbots: Effects of Interaction Mode and Personalization on Task Efficiency and User Experience

This study examines how clarification interaction mode and personalization level jointly influence task efficiency and user experience in e-commerce service encounters. In a 2 × 3 between-subjects experiment, 60 participants were randomly assigned to six conditions and completed five after-sales tasks. Objective performance was assessed by completion time; subjective evaluations included perceived warmth, perceived competence, perceived privacy risk, interaction satisfaction, and cognitive effort. The five completion-time outcomes were analyzed using MANOVA, followed by exploratory task-specific two-way ANOVAs. Selection mode was associated with shorter completion times in each of the five service scenarios and with higher perceived competence and interaction satisfaction than open-input clarification. Exploratory follow-up analyses identified statistically significant personalization effects in some scenarios, and personalization level was associated only with perceived competence among subjective measures. Because task was not modeled as a within-subject factor, these findings do not establish that personalization effects differed statistically across tasks.