Gamified chatbots

: creating value and engagement in online brands’ interactions with consumers

Abstract

The rapid and ongoing transformation of digital economies created a need for developing innovative consumer engagement strategies and find new communication tools to ensure its success. In this sense, using gamification in consumer-brand experiences started to gain much attention, but the existence of little research on its complexity and development of its designs resulted in many businesses failing their engagement strategies. Because of the growing interest in chatbot systems as innovative communication tools and its inevitable association with graceful experiences, the main purpose of this research became to develop the design of a gamified chatbot, to understand whether and how young consumers’ value perceptions affect the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural engagement dimensions. The design was developed with achievement-related game components borrowed from Werbach and Hunter’s (2012) DMC Pyramid, to assess its specific effect on utilitarian and hedonic value perceptions, and engagement. The chatbot and brand used to test the proposed model were created for the present study, and the interaction with the agent had 165participants, that answered the purposely developed questionnaire used as a data collection technique. Structural equation modelling was then applied to treat the obtained data. Empirical results show that hedonic value was found to highly influence all engagement dimensions, while the utilitarian value effect is lower and even non-existent when considering cognitive engagement. Even so, the relationships from the structural model can adequately explain all engagement dimensions. Thus, the study provides a better understanding of the factors that affect consumer-brand engagement and offers useful insights into the importance of designing a strategy that includes intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics for a gamified experience with chatbots.

Date of Award	5 Jul 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Roberta De Cicco (Supervisor) & Susana Silva (Supervisor)