Bots with Empathy: Reactance Against Emotion-Aware AI Agents in Customer Service

The advance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has enabled chatbots to be emotionally responsive. In customer service, expressing empathy is a critical component of employee emotional responsiveness and a popular recovery strategy following service failure. However, the impact of empathy expressed by a chatbot is less clear. In this research, we investigate how and why chatbot-expressed empathy after service failure may influence customers’ service evaluations differently. Extending the psychological reactance literature, we propose that an empathetic chatbot may trigger customer reactance due to the unique nature of AI chatbots (vs. humans). We further propose that the triggered reactance can undermine perceptions of a chatbot’s competence and warmth, ultimately hurting service evaluations. We conducted three laboratory experiments to test these predictions. Our theoretical framework and findings illuminate the more nuanced and distinct role of empathy expressed by AI chatbots, and they suggest a critical need for chatbot developers and companies deploying chatbots to be aware of user reactance in customer service.