Workforce Management Featured Article
Is There a Place for Emojis in the Contact Center?
Most of us love emojis. Those little digital icons that convey love, happiness, anger, sadness, encouragement or revulsion have become integral to our personal communications via text, social media and email. They’re also starting to creep into the mainstream and show up in business-related communications.
Is this cool? It depends on who you ask, and it also may depend on the scenario.
Are the Communications Formal?
If it’s a legal document or a tax filing, you may want to skip the emojis, whether you’re the provider of the services or the recipient. If it’s breaking bad news, introducing new acquaintances, formalizing a business arrangement or any other occasion you might dress up for, it’s a good idea to skip the emojis.
Are the Communications Fostering Friendliness and Openness?
There may be room here for emoji use. It’s often hard to convey emotions with words, particularly for people who aren’t trained writers. Using a “happy face” emoji can convey friendliness better than five lines of text, and can be easier for the recipient of the message to understand.
What About in the Contact Center?
This, too, will depend on the context, but emojis can be highly useful in internal contact center operations to measure quality, according to a recent blog post by workforce management solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert), which recommends contact centers stick to three emojis: a happy face, an expressionless face and an angry face.
“Every call with an acceptable AHT earns a happy face,” according to the blog. “Those on the border get an expressionless face, and those that took too long get an angry face. Now, when the manager receives a list of all calls from the last shift and wants to check on AHT, he can see right away how the contact center is doing. A column of happy faces means a happy manager. A column of angry faces means there is still work to be done, so get those coaches and trainers ready to go.”
Essentially, emojis used in internal operations in the contact center can save managers time by helping summarize individual calls and transactions as well as agent performance.
“Using emojis this way can also help managers in identifying which agents are having the most trouble meeting their goals,” according to Monet.
Too many angry faces in an agent’s shift? It won’t be hard for managers to determine where a bit of extra training needs to go, or at least investigation into procedural holdups that may be causing long handle times. Lots of smiley faces? It’s worth a manager’s time to issue a well-deserved pat on the back.
Edited by Maurice Nagle