Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

What is it about emoticons that have become so important in text interactions? Perhaps as communicating beings, we are subtly influenced by the use of non-verbal cues to interpret responses in real life. The most common emoticon, the happy smile, is essentially positive in nature and conveys cheer, so it would make sense that customers gave higher ratings to agents who used emoticons in their online responses. Yes, there was a survey done about this.

According to a Pennsylvania State study in which participants scored various types of customer service, reps that used emoticons “were even seen as more personal than those who displayed a profile picture along with their responses.”

“The emoticon is even more powerful than the picture, though classic research would say that the richer the modality — for instance, pictures and videos — the higher the social presence,” said S. Shyam (News - Alert) Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, according to Psych Central.

“But the fact that the emoticon came within the message and that this person is conveying some type of emotion to customers makes customers feel like the agent has an emotional presence.”

Other research has shown that emoticons offer multiple positives benefits when used in work conversations.

A University of Missouri-St. Louis study tested how people perceived smiley faces in work emails versus social emails. A group of participants were sent two sets of emails that had added emoticons in some of each.

The results? Smiley faces in both types of email led to recipients liking the sender more, as well as feeling the sender also liked them more.

Of course the results might seem a bit obvious, and while some call them juvenile, and others may think they're a waste of time, there's no doubt that emoticons are here to stay and can at least do a little bit of good in the customer service department.

“Emoticons can be effective vehicles for expression of empathy in customer relations, especially in the mobile ecommerce context,” said Eun Kyung Park, a researcher at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.