Concerned that using exclamation points and emoticons in your customer support correspondence come across as unprofessional? Don’t be!
According to Inc. magazine, business owners can often create more positive customer service experiences and additional opportunities for sales simply by dressing up communication with punctuation. In fact, research shows that subject matter experts who use emoticons are perceived as more “friendly and competent” than those who don’t.
“Face to face, most messages don’t necessarily require explicit friendliness (you wouldn’t grin at a customer two feet in front of you and shout ‘I see what you’re saying!’), because tone and body language convey meaning that text alone does not,” according to the magazine. “Without that extra meaning, email suffer from the negativity effect, wherein the recipient interprets the message as more negative than the sender intended.”
The solution? Some extra touches in the form of exclamation points and emoticons or emojis.
One customer service company, Help Desk, found that of surveyed customer interactions that resulted in a “10 out of 10” rating, 67 percent contained at least one exclamation point, 20 percent included multiple exclamation points, and 23 percent included both an exclamation point and a “:)” emoticon.
“After that finding, the ‘less naturally exclamatory’ people on the team agreed to try adding more exclamation points to their responses,” according to Inc. Their overall customer rating went up the next month.
(Still not convinced? Another study found that ending a text message with only a period can make the sender sound insincere or abrupt.)
A caveat to the advice? Always know your audience and follow your customer’s lead.
“If your customer initiates the conversation with a greeting like ‘Hey folks!’ that’s a good indication you can exclaim and emote to your heart’s content in your reply.” Read more.
