Not with the bot! The relevance of trust to explain the acceptance of chatbots by insurance customers

Industry 4.0 profoundly impacts the insurance sector, as evidenced by the significant growth of insurtech. One of these technologies is chatbots, which enable policyholders to seamlessly manage their active insurance policies. This paper analyses policyholders’ attitude toward conversational bots in this context. To achieve this objective, we employed a structured survey involving policyholders. The survey aimed to determine the average degree of acceptance of chatbots for contacting the insurer to take action such as claim reporting. We also assessed the role of variables of the technology acceptance model, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use, as well as trust, in explaining attitude and behavioral intention. We have observed a low acceptance of insureds to implement insurance procedures with the assistance of a chatbot. The theoretical model proposed to explain chatbot acceptance provides good adjustment and prediction capability. Even though the three assessed factors are relevant for explaining attitude toward interactions with conversational robots and behavioral intention to use them, the variable trust exhibited the greatest impact. The findings of this paper have fair potential theoretical and practical implications. They outline the special relevance of trust in explaining customers’ acceptance of chatbots since this construct impacts directly on attitude but also perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Likewise, improvements in the utility and ease of use of robots are also needed to prevent customers’ reluctance toward their services.