The study was conducted by Keane Rafael Abdon, Alliyah Kaye Abiva, Ruscel Carl Arbilo, Gerick Gonzales, Janine Mae Angel Ong, Fhreiana Roxas, Joy Ann Ragasa, and Roger Idos, all affiliated with Gordon College. The article was published in 2026 in the Jurnal Ekonomi dan Bisnis Digital (MINISTAL), Volume 5, Number 3, pages 191–202.
The findings matter as cafés and other small businesses increasingly use AI-powered tools to automate customer communication. Facebook Messenger chatbots can answer questions instantly, provide information, assist with orders and reservations, and remain available outside normal business hours. For businesses operating in competitive markets, these capabilities can reduce waiting times and improve the customer experience.
Why Chatbots Matter for Café Businesses
Café customers frequently use digital channels to ask about menus, prices, operating hours, product availability, reservations, and orders. A chatbot can handle many of these routine questions without requiring employees to respond individually.
The researchers noted that previous studies had examined chatbot responsiveness, customer trust, willingness to interact, and purchasing behavior in broader business contexts. However, evidence specifically linking these factors to marketing performance among cafés in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone remained limited.
The study therefore focused on whether customers' engagement with Facebook Messenger chatbots was associated with two practical business outcomes: sales conversion and sales growth.
How the Research Was Conducted
The researchers used a quantitative correlational approach and surveyed 20 owners or managers of micro and small café businesses in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. All participants had actively used Facebook Messenger chatbots for marketing or customer service during the previous 12 months. The participants were selected because they met specific criteria related to business size and chatbot use.
Data were collected through a researcher-developed questionnaire distributed using Google Forms. The questions measured three aspects of customer engagement: how responsive the chatbot was perceived to be, how much customers trusted the chatbot, and their willingness to interact with it. Marketing performance was assessed through perceived sales conversion and sales growth.
The researchers analyzed the responses using descriptive statistics and Spearman's Rho correlation analysis to determine whether customer engagement and marketing performance were significantly related.
Chatbots Received Strongly Positive Ratings
The results showed that café owners and managers viewed Facebook Messenger chatbots positively across several dimensions.
- Responsiveness: The overall score was 3.63 out of 4, indicating strong agreement that chatbots respond effectively to customers.
- Customer trust and willingness to interact: The overall score was 3.59 out of 4.
- Sales conversion: The overall score was 3.45 out of 4.
- Sales growth: The overall score was 3.50 out of 4.The strongest responsiveness indicator was the chatbot's ability to handle multiple customer inquiries efficiently, which received a score of 3.85. This suggests that café operators particularly valued the ability of automated systems to manage several customer questions at once.
However, the lowest responsiveness score, 3.40, concerned the chatbot's ability to resolve inquiries without human intervention. The result suggests that automated systems remain more suitable for routine questions than complicated customer concerns.
Customer acceptance was also relatively strong. The highest-rated indicator for trust and willingness to interact was customers' willingness to use chatbots despite their artificial nature, which received a score of 3.75.
Positive Perceptions Do Not Mean Significant Business Results
One of the study's most important findings is the distinction between positive perceptions and statistically significant business outcomes.
Although respondents believed chatbots helped convert inquiries into orders and encouraged customers to complete purchases, the statistical analysis found no significant relationship between chatbot-based customer engagement and marketing performance.
The relationship involving perceived responsiveness produced a p-value of 0.110, while customer trust and willingness to interact produced a p-value of 0.533. Both figures were above the study's 0.05 significance threshold.
In practical terms, the finding does not mean that chatbots are useless for cafés. Instead, it indicates that chatbot engagement by itself cannot be shown, based on this sample, to be a significant driver of marketing performance.
As the Gordon College researchers explain, chatbots can improve communication efficiency and customer experience, but other factors may play a more important role in determining marketing outcomes.
Businesses Should Combine AI With Human Support
The researchers recommend that café owners continue using chatbots for immediate customer assistance while maintaining human support for more complex situations. A combination of automated and human communication can provide customers with both speed and personalized assistance.
Cafés are also encouraged to integrate chatbots with other marketing activities, including social media campaigns, loyalty programs, promotional offers, and personalized customer engagement. Regularly updating chatbot content is important to ensure that customers receive accurate information and continue to trust the system.
This approach positions AI as a supporting technology rather than a replacement for broader business strategy. Product quality, pricing, service quality, customer satisfaction, and other marketing activities may have a stronger influence on business performance than chatbot use alone.
Important Limitations
The findings should be interpreted cautiously because the research involved only 20 café owners or managers. The small sample limits the statistical power of the analysis and means the results cannot automatically be generalized to all cafés in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone.
The marketing-performance measures were also based on participants' own perceptions rather than independently verified sales records, financial statements, or transaction-level data. This creates the possibility that reported results may differ from actual business performance.
The researchers recommend future studies with larger samples and wider geographic coverage, as well as additional factors such as customer satisfaction, service quality, brand loyalty, and customer retention.
Author Profile
The research was authored by Keane Rafael Abdon, Alliyah Kaye Abiva, Ruscel Carl Arbilo, Gerick Gonzales, Janine Mae Angel Ong, Fhreiana Roxas, Joy Ann Ragasa, and Roger Idos, all affiliated with Gordon College, Philippines. Alliyah Kaye Abiva is identified as the corresponding author. The published article does not provide the academic degrees or individual fields of expertise of the authors, so those details cannot be reliably added from the source.
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