The Importance of Integrating Emojis Into Your Customer Service Communication

Marketing isn’t the only department of your business where emoji use can make a big difference. Knowing that a large percentage of consumers are using emojis in all of their other messaging apps, integrating emoji options into your in-app messaging can help to facilitate communication. By adding in personalized or branded emojis to your in-app chat, you are letting your customers know that you understand them, you are forward-thinking and are ready to connect with them.

Personalization provides you with the opportunity to meet the consumer where they are, instead of where you are. By focusing on the shifting consumer behavior and the use of emojis instead of on existing practices, you can add a unique level of functionality to your in-app chat features. Keep in mind to pick the emojis that best represent your brand, speak to your customers, and allow them to speak to you. It’s up to you to set the tone.

Emoji may have started as something people used in their personal lives, but these little pictorial icons have certainly made a successful journey from the consumer to the business world. Most business emails have an emoji sign-off these days.

It’s clear that emoji are no longer the preserves of the instant-messaging youth and as every good marketer knows if your customers are changing their behavior you need to listen and adapt. Emoji usage is also extending out of the workplace – businesses can also use them to engage with customers, during any customer communications.

 

Why Emojis Are Used in Customer Service in 2020

Emojis are charming. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business with a handful of employees or a giant corporation, consumers want their experience with you to feel personal. For the experience to feel personal, the company has to behave like a person. This means you are friendly and informal in your communication style. It means you’re not afraid to use humor where appropriate. It means you give your employees the agency to express themselves in the role. There’s a reason that company Twitter accounts that focus on a more personal communication style is more effective. This can mean that the employee signs their name at the end of a Tweet, or that all Tweets are written in the first person.

Emojis are considered to be informal so they are an extremely useful tool to utilize in informal communication. Your customers are already using emojis every day, so why shouldn’t you?

 

What you can do with emoji analysis

Information contained in Social media, which became one of the major types of communication, makes them an attractive source of data for sentiment analysis. Not only texts but also emoticons, which represent linguistic elements typically used on social media to elicit a given message, can be used to boost sentiment analysis.

The precision of recognizing emotions can increase and improve with the analysis of emojis. They provide a crucial piece of information and this is essential for companies in order to better understand their customer’s feelings. The way people communicate is constantly changing thanks to technology; in order to understand what they are saying, it is important that companies adjust the way they are listening to suit these changes, and this means taking also emojis into account.

 

In Summary

Emojis are a way of demonstrating emotion, which can otherwise be quite difficult to do on written channels in the contact center.

However, customers will likely either love them or loathe them, so it is generally best to let the customer lead and for the advisor to mirror their usage of them.

Also, just remember to avoid overusing emojis and opening a conversation with one. After all, you are unlikely to have much information about the customer’s preferences about them.

It’s important for any company to keep up with new trends in the virtual world, particularly if your target audience lives online. Now that you’ve seen how emojis can be used to increase customer engagement, why not give it a shot and see how it can increase customer satisfaction?

But the most important thing to remember is to use emojis in a way that best suits your brand and your customer base. Good luck??  ?

Article by – Sabin Gomez
Development Manager | Contact Center Digital Solutions | Customer Experience Strategy.