Academic SeminarService with Emoticons: How Customers Interpret Service Employees’ Use of Emoticons in Online Service Encounters
- Date
- 2018-04-12 ~ 2018-04-12
- Time
- 16:00 ~ 17:30
- Place
- Lecture Room 9303
- Department
- ME Admin. Team
- Manager
- Sunhee Joo , shjoo2006@kaist.ac.kr
- Major
- Marketing
We would like to invite you to participate in Management Engineering(ME) Seminar.
1. When: April 12th (Thursday), 16:00 ~ 17:20
2. Where: No.9 Building, 3rd floor, Lecture Room 9303
3. Speaker: Prof. Sara Kim (The University of Hong Kong)
4. Topic: Service with Emoticons: How Customers Interpret Service Employees’ Use of Emoticons in Online Service Encounters
5. Research field: Marketing
* Lecture will be delivered in Korean
Abstract
Across six studies, including both laboratory and field experiments, the current research examines customers’ perceptions of a service employee’s use of emoticons in online service encounters. We show that customers perceive service employees who use emoticons as higher in warmth but lower in competence than those who do not (study 1). We also identify an emoticon’s unique characteristic that is distinct from nonverbal cues in face-to-face communications (study 2) and compare emoticons with other online casual languages, particularly internet slang (study 3). We further show that the proposed emoticon effects apply to both positive and negative emoticons and are conditional on customers’ relationship norm orientation (study 4). Specifically, communal-oriented (exchange-oriented) customers are more likely to infer higher warmth (lower competence) and thus to be more (less) satisfied with the service when a service employee uses emoticons. We also examine two practically important contextual factors, unsatisfactory service outcomes (study 5) and employees’ extra-role service behaviors (study 6), that can situationally override customers’ general relationship norm orientation and thus influence customers’ attitudes toward the service and actual purchasing behaviors.
Contact : jisun, Lee ( issue96@business.kaist.ac.kr )
