“Ready for Your Insurance Quote?” the Impact of Chatbot Empathy on Emotions and User Experience

The development of “social” chatbots capable of engaging in empathetic conversations with users is one of the earliest goals of artificial intelligence (AI) (Zhou et al. in Comput. Linguist. 46:53–93, 2020). In financial services, companies are increasingly deploying chatbots for the benefit of their customers. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have investigated the chatbot-user experience in a real use-case scenario (Zhu et al. in  Data Inf. Manag. 100041, 2023) in order to better understand how consumers respond to a chatbot’s empathy, and how this affects their experience as customers. To address this gap, 12 participants were invited to interact with an empathetic chatbot for auto insurance quotes. The method first comprised this interactive experience of a real-case scenario simulation, and was followed by a Retrospective Think-Aloud Protocol (RTAP) step, where participants reviewed the recorded video of their interaction with the chatbot, and indicated their emotions at key identified moments during the simulation. The results demonstrated that managing users’ expectations is a key factor in the quality of chatbot–user interaction. Empathy seems to have generated more negative than positive emotions in participants. As a result, data use transparency and private data protection remain important concerns in this context. This study simultaneously explores the effect of a chatbot’s empathy on both user emotions and experience in a specific use-case scenario (i.e., insurance quote). It also presents a methodological contribution through the use of the RTAP method and proposes key takeaways for designing empathetic chatbots that will live up to the expectations of users in the Insurtech industry.