Service with emoticons : how customers interpret service employees’ use of emoticons in online service encounters

Abstract

Although emoticons have become remarkably popular in various marketing campaigns, few marketing studies have theoretically and empirically examined how customers interpret service employees' use of emoticons in online service encounters. To fill this gap, as well as to reconcile prior work documenting both positive and negative effects of emoticons, this thesis decomposes customers' inferences about online service employees who use emoticons in terms of warmth and competence perceptions. I show that service employees' use of emoticons exerts opposing effects of increasing customers' perception of the employees' warmth but reducing their perception of the employees' competence. These effects apply to both positive and negative emoticons and are conditional on customers' relationship norm orientation. Specifically, communal-oriented (exchange-oriented) customers are more likely to infer higher warmth (lower competence) and thus are more (less) satisfied with the service when an employee uses emoticons. I further examine unsatisfactory service outcomes and employees' extra-role service behaviors (i.e., discretionary customer service behaviors that go beyond formal job requirements) as contextual factors that influence customers' inferential processes of service employees' use of emoticons. The current thesis is also the first to explore an emoticons' unique characteristic that is distinctive from nonverbal cues in face-to-face interactions and to compare emoticons with other online casual languages such as internet slangs. Across seven studies, including both laboratory and field experiments, I showed that customers infer that a service employee who uses emoticons is higher in warmth but lower in competence than one who does not (study 1). I also identified an emoticons' unique characteristic that is distinctive from nonverbal cues in face-to-face communications (study 2), and compared emoticons with other online casual languages, particularly internet slangs (study 3). I further showed that the proposed emoticon effects are conditional on customers' relationship norm orientation (study 4), that can apply to both positive and negative emoticons (study 5). I also examine two practically important contextual factors, unsatisfactory service outcomes (study 6) and employees' extra-role service behaviors (study 7), that can situationally override customers' general relationship norm orientation and thus influence customers' attitude toward the service and actual purchasing behaviors. These findings also provide important implications for the strategic implementation of emoticons in online service encounters.