Emoticons may signal better customer service: study

Online customer service agents who use emoticons and are fast typists are more likely to put smiles on their customers' faces during business-related text chats, researchers including one of Indian-origin have found.
In a study, people who text chatted with customer service agents gave higher scores to the agents who used emoticons in their responses than agents who did not use emoticons, said S Shyam Sundar, professor at The Pennsylvania State University in the US.
The customers also reported that agents who used emoticons were more personal than agents who used a profile picture with their responses.
According to Sundar, while emoticons may seem too casual or even too silly to play a role in formal communications, the study shows that they can play an important role in professional and business communications.

"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 Sundar, who worked with Eun Kyung Park, a researcher at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.
"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," said Sundar.

Customers prefer customer service agents who can demonstrate their empathy over agents who do not, said Park.
"Emoticons can be effective vehicles for expression of empathy in customer relations, especially in the mobile ecommerce context," Park said.

The researchers also said that agents who responded more quickly to customers during the chat were rated more positively than those who did not.
This quick, back-and-forth - synchronous - type of conversation, makes customers feel more like they are taking part in a real conversation.
"When people are instant messaging, for example, and the messages are flying back and forth, so that one person sends a message and the other person immediately responds, it feels like they are in the same place," said Sundar.
Responsiveness is particularly important when businesses deal with customer complaints, according to Park.
"Feelings of co-presence, constructed by the agent's promptness, might lead customers to be loyal to the company by creating a favourable service experience," Park added.

The researchers found that while both responsiveness during conversations and the use of emoticons resulted in improved customer ratings, the two tactics seemed to take different routes to achieve those results.
The emoticons made customers feel emotionally connected to the agent, but the quick conversations gave customers a feeling of being together in a physical sense.
The finding was published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour.