Hey, that’s AI! Most consumers can differentiate chatbots from human customer service advisors
The Beatles released their first song in nearly five decades last year, complete with John Lennon’s vocals - courtesy of artificial intelligence. While such creations are reason for fans’ cheer, it can sometimes also be reason for their confusion - in discerning the real from the AI-powered versions.
Customer service is another space AI is enthusiastically employed in these days. Songs by AI-powered voices may confuse listeners - but do consumers mistake AI-powered chatbots for human customer service advisors?
A recent YouGov survey asked consumers across 17 international markets how confident, if at all, they are in their ability to differentiate between human customer service advisors and AI chatbots when using online customer service. Three in five consumers across markets (60%) say they are confident they can tell the difference. On the other hand, nearly three in ten consumers (28%) say they aren’t confident.
YouGov’s demographic data reveals that men are more likely than women to be confident in their abilities to differentiate a human customer service advisor from an AI chatbot (63% vs. 57%).
By country:
Consumers in the UAE (76%), Italy (75%) and India (73%) feature in the top three in YouGov’s list of markets where consumers are the most confident about differentiating between AI chatbots and human customer service advisors, when seeking online customer service.
Germans, on the other hand, are least confident. They account for the largest proportion of consumers across markets (46%) who say they aren’t confident about telling apart an AI chatbots from a human customer service advisor, followed by Swedes (36%) and the French (36%).
In Asia, equal proportions of Hong Kongers (30%) and Indonesians (30%) say they are not confident of their ability to differentiate between AI chatbots and human customer service advisors – making them the most likely in this region to say. Singaporeans (29%) follow Hong Kongers and Indonesians at a close second.
As for Americans, they are more likely to say they are confident (58%) about identifying AI chatbots and human customer service advisors when using online customer service, than they are to say they are not (26%). Compared to Americans, a larger proportion of Brits (66%) say they are confident about differentiating between AI chatbots and human customer service agents.
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 17 markets with sample sizes varying between 500 and 2001 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in November 2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.
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