Chatbot-Administered Surveys in Marketing: A Literature Review

This article reviews investigations of online survey chatbots across disciplines and offers insights into their potential to encourage innovative and practical approaches to marketing research surveys. Online surveys deployed in service practice can effectively capture customer feedback. Using chatbots to administer such surveys can have desirable outcomes, although specific advantages and disadvantages are not clear at this point. Based on a meta-analysis of prior research on the use of chatbots in online surveys, this article presents a typology of relevant themes and avenues for further research. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method initially yielded 1,827 unique papers from Scopus, of which 30 qualify for in-depth analysis. The analysis identifies five key survey administration capabilities of chatbots: data collection, conversational interfaces, interactivity, humanization, and effective response generation. It also highlights the challenges and research gaps associated with each capability.