Sustainable Customer Engagement Through AI Chatbots: A Conceptual Model of Mediators and Moderators in Digital Marketing

Abstract

Caused by AI chatbots, the customer-brand interaction is undergoing revolutionary changes in the engagement mechanism, with real-time and personalized and scalable interactions. Although they have been adopted in digital marketing more and more, little focus has been on their psychological and situational path underlying their part in sustainable customer engagement. This paper will design a conceptual framework that will be used to analyze the mediating role of trust, personalization, user satisfaction and emotion engagement and moderating variables such as digital literacy, industry type, privacy and marketing strategy maturity. The proposed model bridges important gaps in the research because it changes the emphasis laid on technical development of chatbots to integration into marketing systems in a strategic way. The results of previous studies prove that chatbot quality determines the loyalty of customers due to satisfaction, trust, whereas the situational circumstances condition the perception of value and the sustainability of engagement. The paper has a theoretical contribution because it combines both the psychological and contextual factors in the study of AI-marketing and can guide practitioners who want to use chatbots in a morally and socially rightful manner. The study by helping to explain the mediators and moderators of chatbot effectiveness demonstrates the potential of AI chatbots as long-term and sustainable digital marketing tools of engagement.