Assessing the adoption and impact of AI chatbots in customer service: A survey-based study in Indian service industries

This research paper tries to fill a major gap in the available literature by discussing the adoption and impact of chatbots in the service industry in India. Present research is aimed at mapping the level of integration of chatbots into customer service processes in Indian service industries and its impact on customer service quality. The design of research is cross-sectional survey-based. Data have been collected from 200 organizations representing different industries: retail, banking, healthcare, telecommunications, and e-commerce. It undertakes data analysis on IBM SPSS Statistics to analyse the adoption level, challenges, customer satisfaction, and variations within sectors. The key findings of the study are that the adoption rate is high in Indian service industries, with 39.0% of organizations showing complete adoption and 45.0% partial adoption. As many as 60.0% of organizations reported a positive impact of chatbots on customer service quality. Several challenges, like the issue of linguistic diversity and how to handle complex queries, were identified, and upon consideration, made the organizations adopt multilingual chatbots and enhancements in the algorithm for natural language processing. It ranges from variations in the level of chatbot adoption to sectoral level: the highest full adoption rates among the banking organizations and the highest partial adoptions occurred among the healthcare organizations. The higher the level of its adoption, the more satisfied customers are with chatbots. These results, therefore, have practical implications for guiding Indian service industries on the adoption and challenges of chatbots, as well as customer-centric strategies for the same. Further, this study helps plug the gap in the literature by bringing specific insights from the Indian context to the global discussion relating to chatbots and their role in customer service.