This paper advances our theoretical understanding of online service delivery with regard to live chat technology. Online customer support via live chat offers customers a way in which they can interact with service personnel in the online environment. Through the use of an online questionnaire and conducting structural equation modelling, the aim of this research is to understand the variables directly influencing the use of a live chat function with a customer service representative during use of a website. The findings outline eight variables that motivate the use of live chat, accounting for 71% explained variance. The research illustrates the variables influencing such use is dependent on the context for initiating the chat discussion, namely for search/navigation support or decision support. This paper offers key managerial implications, highlighting the importance of offering customers a live chat function and why website users are motivated to use live chat. The paper illustrates the role of online live chat as a service recovery tool and a service feedback tool.

Introduction

With over half of the world’s population active online (WeAreSocial, 2019), researchers have taken great interest in exploring online service provision. The Internet was once considered as an impoverished experience due to the inability to interact with service personnel (McLean and Osei-Frimpong, 2017). However, over recent years, we have seen the rise of functions providing website users the ability to interact with other customers, businesses and service representatives (Chattaraman et al., 2019; Lew et al., 2018). Such services include social network channels, live chat systems and online help desks. Despite the environment (offline or online), organisations acknowledge that high quality customer service is of upmost importance in order to remain competitive (Wang, 2011). A high quality service can result in a range of positive outcomes including reduced complaints behaviour, positive word of mouth, satisfaction and increased re-visit intention (Martin et al., 2015; Meuter et al., 2000; Verhoef et al., 2009). As a result, many organisations have turned their attention to allocate significant amounts of resource to provide customers with a high quality customer service, thus in an attempt we have seen the introduction of live chat functions being used as customer service platforms (Chattaraman et al., 2012; Lv et al., 2018; McLean and Osei-Frimpong, 2017). A review of the literature finds that live chat functions are often referred to as virtual agents (Abbattista et al., 2002), conversational agents (Cassell et al., 2000), and avatars (Chattaraman et al., 2012) and can be operated by a human service representative or through artificial intelligence (chatbots). The systems enable one-to-one synchronised communication between the service provider and service receiver.