ServiceFriday: Service with Emoticons – A Good or Bad Thing?
It is extremely common to use emoticons in daily chatting. They can even be used to interpret an entire sentence. Using emoticons will attach strong emotions to communication, in other words, they bring warmth and connection to people. This strategy has been utilized in commercial relationships as well. As the first research on the role of emoticons in business relationships, authors Xueni Li, Kimmy Wa Chan, and Sara Kim have conducted four studies on exploring the customers’ response to emoticons when they are communal or exchange oriented, and under two types of service situations: unsatisfactory services and employees’ extra-role services.
The base concept of this research is that emoticon senders are often simultaneously evaluated on two fundamental dimensions: warmth and competence. During a business service communication, the customer could emphasize the communal function or the exchange function. In other words, when customers value the communal relationship more, he/she will recognize the usage of emoticons as an expression of warmth. When customers are prone to an exchange relationship, they will think that emoticons are signs of incompetence. As a result, the mixture in the relationship norms leads to opposite conceptions of emoticons in commercial communication.
The results bring us to the question: How can we effectively use emoticons in a commercial relationship? The researchers suggest that it is crucial to take customer relationship norms into consideration. The usage of emoticons is encouraged when the marketing environment is more communal. However, when service failure occurs, the exchange norm in a relationship is more salient. Therefore it is better that employees present a professional and accurate image without using emoticons. Moreover, the company could motivate employees to use emoticons while providing extra services, which will have a positive effect on enhancing customer experiences.
To access the article, visit the Journal of Consumer Research at Oxford Academic at this link: https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article/45/5/973/4924869. (A fee to access the article may apply.)