Let’s Chat Internal: User Acceptance of an In-Company Service Desk Chatbot

Due to remote working models, which were strengthened by the COVID-19 pandemic, it became highly relevant to digitalize on-site service desk consultations. Virtual enterprise assistants which simplify the interaction with in-company services provide similar advantages to their popular peers in customer service: high availability and customer satisfaction, and low response time and costs. To find out how their usage affects user acceptance we developed an early high-fidelity prototype for an in-company UX service desk chatbot and evaluated it in an online survey (N=53) and user study (N=14) with employees from the industry using the Technology Acceptance Model. The results show that the prototype’s acceptance does not differ from the classical service and prior experiences with textual chatbots in a private usage context but was rated higher than a private sample bot.