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1. Introduction
As e-commerce continues its fast growth domestically and world-wide, an increasing number of e-retail organizations are choosing to provide real-time customer service to their customers online (McLean and Wilson, 2016; Mero, 2018). One specific type of service is live chat. “Live chat systems” have been known as organizations’ “offering customer service and online support through instant messaging platforms” (McLean and Osei-Frimpong, 2017, p. 494). Previous research also refers to such live chat systems as “web-based live-chat support services” which provide both customers and organizations with web-based synchronous media, through which a customer can seek service-related information from an organization and a human organization representative can provide answers (Turel et al., 2013, p. 99). Given that e-service generally refers to the service that is offered by an organization via an electronic system (Parasuraman et al., 2005; Rust, 2001) and is delivered and intermediated via various information technologies (Chen et al., 2017), live chat can thus be viewed as an e-service from this perspective. As many organizations adopt this web-based instant messaging technology to support their e-service offering in the context of e-commerce, the present study uses the term “live chat e-service” to refer to the interactive real-time customer service that an organization offers to its customers via instant messaging live chat system.
Companies and organizations that sell online products and services offer this cost-effective live chat e-service to provide timely online support, answer customers’ questions and assist customers to solve problems (McLean and Wilson, 2016; Turel and Connelly, 2013). Customers can use live chat e-service to make real-time information inquiries when they need specific information about products (Mero, 2018). Live chat has already become a preferred customer service option to a telephonic call center (Lockwood, 2017). As more and more customers choose to use live chat e-service to request information and communicate with an organization, research in this service area is worth conducting to support organizations’ live chat e-service offering and should presumably draw more attention from researchers. However, McLean and Osei-Frimpong (2017) pointed out that research on the dynamics and influencing factors of the online live chat service is scarce in literature and prior to their research study no empirical studies had examined the factors that might influence customer satisfaction...