How Emoji in Company Responses to Online Consumer Complaints Affect Observers: Emoji as Visual Signalling Cues in Webcare

When companies respond to consumer complaints on social media, many others can observe this online complaint handling (‘webcare’). Therefore, public service recovery messages not just affect the initial consumer’s satisfaction, but also observers’ perceptions, and companies’ webcare responses need to be carefully crafted. In online business communication, emoji are increasingly used. To explore how different kinds of emoji – in interaction with tone of voice – affect observers’ evaluations of companies as visual signalling cues, two experiments (N = 1,202) were conducted. Findings reveal that emoji expressing emotions can make companies come across as more human and personal, but emoji have an overall negative impact in webcare, mostly via lower perceptions of professionalism. Yet an informal or personal language style (‘conversational human voice’) turns these negative effects around. Companies should thus be cautious with using emoji when responding to online complaints and should rather focus on using the appropriate tone of voice.