Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Conversational commerce is defined as the type of autonomous innovation for delivering convenience, decision support and customer’s personalization. Basically, the main objective of conversational commerce is to help online customers to interact and communicate newly with each other through proper interfaces using autonomous innovation. In contrast to conventional commerce, conversational commerce has recently become a vital aspect in merchandising and marketing communication in the modern world, according to Messina’s work (2015). This type of commerce allows humans to communicate and connect, as presented by Kerdvibulvech (2015), via artificial chatting robots, texting programs, and simulating cyber helpers. Large innovative firms have assigned large budgets for the development of robots with deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision, such as the Gunasekara et al. (2019) work for quantized dialog by learning and predicting transitions probabilities between clusters of the utterances and Kerdvibulvech and Yamauchi’s work (2014) for 3D gait signatures using computer vision, in order to allow the devices to deliver data and services in a convenient and two-way manner. The rise of this conversational interface is proposed by Mctear (2017). Conversational commerce sellers are found to be more effective in terms of digitized connectivity, high virtual interaction, and seller credibility when compared with regular e-commerce sellers. Recently, there have been several studies on the pros and cons of e-commerce and face-to-face commerce, but there is still a limited number of findings when it comes to the new area of conversational commerce. In fact, conversational commerce has grown rapidly in recent years. Additionally, there have been different foreign publications claiming the advantages of either conversational commerce or conventional commerce such as Martínez and Mckee’s work (2016) for bots and payments, Piyush et al.’s work (2016) for conversational commerce of e-business, and Feng et al.’s work (2018) for a unified implicit dialog framework. However, in Thailand, to the best of our knowledge, there are still no comparative findings between conversational commerce and conventional commerce in terms of customer satisfaction benefits.
In this paper, our research examines the differences between conversational commerce and conventional commerce by using nine customer satisfaction factors from literature reviews to determine different areas in which conversational commerce and conventional commerce excel in. In addition to a statistical comparison, this research can be utilized by marketing communicators, digital-era sales specialists, and those that study communication arts in order to acquire the potentialities of conversational commerce in terms of sales promotion, daily-life online marketing, SME product, and startup services. At the same time, areas of improvement for conversational commerce are provided for modern marketers to perform competitively with conventional off-line vendors, as presented in our previous work by Rungvithu and Kerdvibulvech (2018). Moreover, cryptocurrency research is extended and conducted in this paper using interviews as a data collect method in qualitative research. Figure 1 shows our conceptual framework for conversational commerce and conventional commerce. Factors include product cost, meeting customer needs, seller friendliness, keeping customers in touch, deserving expected products, delivery time, Point-of-Purchase condition, seller credibility and product/brand image. Dependent variable in our work is customer satisfaction which is compared between conversational commerce and conventional commerce. The rest of this paper is structured and divided into five main parts as follows. First, we review existing works of customer satisfaction, including factors contributing to customer satisfaction, customer satisfaction measurement, and hypotheses. Second, we present a methodology for research design & question design, and then propose a method for recruiting of participants and respondent qualifications. Third, we summarize the results from a set of nine factors. Fourth, we discuss our experimental results. Finally, we give a conclusion and suggest some possible future directions.
Figure 1. Our conceptual framework showing conversational commerce and conventional commerce