How the Voice of Human and Artificial Intelligence Agents Impacts Customer
Prof. Siliang TONG
Assistant Professor
Nanyang Technological University
Date: 14 September 2023 (Thursday)
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: E22 – G015
Host: Prof. Grace HO, Assistant Professor in Marketing
Online registration: https://umac.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2f3CvJmy8KCeq2O
Abstract
Most previous studies have explored the correlations between salespeople’s voices and customers’ perceptions. This research scrutinizes whether and how human and artificial intelligence (AI) agents’ voice features may causally impact actual customer purchases based on two randomized field experiments and an online study. In Field Experiment 1, we gauge the causal impact by directly manipulating the voice stability (e.g., variance in pitch, amplitude, and speed) of the AI voicebot in the context of sales calls promoting a credit card business. The results not only identify that AI agents’ voice stability and speech adaptivity can positively impact customer purchases but also reveal a novel synergistic interaction effect between these two speech features. Field Experiment 2 randomly assigns either human agents or a well-designed AI voicebot to conduct sales calls to promote consumer loans and leverages machine learning techniques to quantify human and AI agents’ voice stability with variance in pitch, amplitude, and speed of speech. The results replicate those in the first experiment and reveal a new finding—compared with human agents, AI voicebots demonstrate a more stable voice (i.e., lower variance in pitch, amplitude, and speed) and a greater level of speech adaptivity, which can account for their superior sales performance. A follow-up online preregistered experiment replicates the synergistic effect between voice stability and speech adaptivity and uncovers the underlying mechanisms. Our findings provide useful managerial implications for training human sales agents on voice features and using AI voicebots to increase customer purchases.
Speaker
Prof. Siliang (Jack) Tong is the assistant professor at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. He earned his Doctoral degree in Marketing from the Fox School of Business, Temple University in 2020. Prof. Tong is an empirical modeler who is interested in the substantive areas of artificial intelligence, mobile app marketing, and sharing economy. He is very active in research as his works were awarded as the best paper and finalist in multiple occasions such as AMA conference and ISMS Marketing Science conference. His research is published in Strategic Management Journal, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Before joining the academia, he had 6-year management experience in digital marketing and web analytics, and he obtained his MBA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016.
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