Apology or gratitude? The effect of communication recovery strategies for service failures of AI devices

As social actors, artificial intelligence (AI) devices are used in tourism. However, it’s challenging for enterprises to choose recoveries for their service failures. To fill this gap, we divide these service failures from the perspective of consumers’ basic psychological needs: being rejected and being ignored due to AI lacking flexibility and common sense. Based on the Need-Threat model and three experiments, we find that chatbots express gratitude (vs. apology) will be more likely to gain consumers’ forgiveness if service failures of AI devices are being rejected (vs. being ignored); this main effect is mediated by relational needs (vs. efficacy needs).