Open AccessMediated Communication and Customer Service Experiences
Author(s) -
Kate K. Mays,
James E. Katz,
Jacob Groshek
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
periodica polytechnica. social and management sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.223
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1587-3803
pISSN - 1416-3837
DOI - 10.3311/ppso.16882
Subject(s) - modalities , customer satisfaction , equity (law) , customer service , marketing , personality , service (business) , psychology , business , knowledge management , social psychology , computer science , sociology , political science , law , social science
People around the world who seek to interact with large organisations increasingly find they must do so via mediated and automated communication. Organisations often deploy both mediated and automated platforms, such as instant messaging and interactive voice response systems (IVRs), for efficiency and cost-savings. Customer and client responses to these systems range from delight to frustration. To better understand the factors affecting people's satisfaction with these systems, we conducted a representative U.S. national survey (N = 1321). We found that people overwhelmingly like and trust in-person customer service compared to mediated and automated modalities. As to demographic attitude predictors, age was important (older respondents liked mediated systems less), but income and education were not strong attitude predictors. For personality variables, innovativeness was positively associated with mediated system satisfaction. However, communication apprehensiveness, which we expected to be related to satisfaction, was not. We conclude by discussing implications for the burgeoning field of human-machine communication, as well as social policy, equity, and the pullulating digital services divide.