Emoji + chatbots = a perfect match?🤔

The dawn of the chatbot era is already behind 🌅🤖

Now you can order a pizza, book a flight or even apply for a job with the help of a chatbot assistant. But how, and what’s more important, why did they become so popular in the last few years?🤷‍♀️

In a nutshell: chatbots make life easier.

Customer services are good examples of that. With chatbots, they can provide instant responses for basic questions and even resolve complaints 24/7, whilst the team can concentrate on more complex tasks which lead to higher customer engagement and happier, more efficient employees.

Sounds too good to be true? 👉Here👈 you can read more about the topic.

A brief history of emoji 🦕⏱

In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created the first set of emoji for DOCOMO with 176 pieces of 12 x12 pixel large pictograms of people, places and things. The word “emoji” comes from the Japanese language characters: 絵 (“e,” picture), 文 (“mo,” write) and 字 (“ji,” character).

DOCOMO’s emoji was created for a specific reason: find new ways to express things and to ease text message communication.

Source: Courtesy Standards Manual

2010 was the year when the Unicode system officially adopted emoji, so it became a legitimate form of communication. One year later, Apple added the official emoji keyboard to iOS, and Android followed its path two years later. So, emoji keyboards are available on both systems since 2013.

By the broad and increasing usage of emoji, the demand for diversity escalated.

The option to change human emoji skin tones was the first big step towards diversity in 2015. Since then, we have updates with magical creatures, but most importantly, various ways to represent people. 🧜‍♂️ 🧘🏿‍♀️ 🧕🏼 🧛🏻‍♀️ 🧔🏾 🤱🏽 🦄
And this February, Unicode unveiled their new set of gender-neutral emoji and emojis that represent people with disabilities.

So as you can see emoji is rapidly evolving both in number and variety.

Emoji make communication faster, easier and more efficient 👍📱

Communicating via text can easily lead to misunderstandings. Why? Our messages miss a few elements that we have in real life communication:

– Tone of voice 🙊

– Gestures 🙈

– Emotions 🐵

( However, even with these helpful elements, real-life conversations sometimes can be just as confusing as a text message. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️)

Source: giphy.com

Emoji were created to minimize this “expressional” gap between text and real-life communication, in short words:

Emoji put the text in the right context.👍

Did you know that the human brain read and react the same way to an emoji as it does to a person’s face? 🧠

Increase engagement by emoji reactions 😍😯😄 — Bonomi’s best practice

Chatbots are built to engage with the users via one-to-one text messages, so by their nature, they give users more personal user experience than a website or a mobile app. But finding the right voice for your chatbot can be challenging, right? 😓

Good news for you: Emoji can help you to set the tone of your messages, and people love to use emoji when interacting with chatbots! 

Source: Photo by Segun Osunyomi on Unsplash

By giving your users the opportunity to use emoji, you can get a higher number of reactions which leads to a higher level of engagement. Of course, you probably have to consider things like emoji dialects, chances of misunderstanding and that they simply do not fit for some business profile.

Did you know that millennials more likely to prefer mobile platforms to plan their vacation? Also, 55% of them report that they gain a positive experience by interacting with a business chatbot. So, in the hospitality business, mobile communication and finding the right tone is a crucial element.

Via Facebook Messenger travel companies and hotels can reach out for millennials easily and have more real-time engagement and also ensure a better customer service experience. 😍🔝

So, I can only encourage you to use emoji and find your chatbot’s own voice because it can make a change for good! 
Remember this when you set up your Hotel’s Bonomi Assistant😉