Chatbots in Customer Service: A Systematic Review of Adoption, Performance, and Customer Outcomes

Abstract

This article examines how chatbots are adopted and used in customer service and how they influence service performance and customer outcomes. It asks which factors drive customer and provider adoption, under what conditions chatbots improve efficiency and service quality, and how chatbot interactions shape satisfaction, trust, loyalty, and negative reactions such as perceived creepiness or privacy concerns. The study conducts a systematic review of peer reviewed research published between 2018 and 2021, synthesizing quantitative and qualitative evidence across industries and countries. The results show that chatbots can enhance response speed, perceived service quality, and compliance when they are usable, responsive, transparent, and clearly positioned as complements to human agents. However, poorly calibrated social cues, opaque data practices, and weak escalation paths can undermine trust and loyalty, limiting the benefits of automation. The review discusses these patterns by organizing studies around adoption, performance, and customer outcomes and concludes that future work should employ integrated, multi method approaches that link specific design features to both operational metrics and long-term relational outcomes.