Intelligence

Emojot Powers the Weekly Business Temperature of COVID-19 Impact on Silicon Valley Companies

Data-driven insight is powerful, particularly in a crisis! People, businesses, and governments around the world are dealing with the paralyzing effect caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. These effects manifest and change daily! In such a significantly changing landscape, the need to understand the substantial impact of the crisis on companies is very important. The strategies and critical decisions that businesses adopt to deal with the impact on their corporate financial ‘health’ inevitably have an effect on the larger state and country economies. The San Francisco Bay Area’s Alliance of Chief Executives have weathered through 2 other major crises in their 24-year history – the 2000 dot.com crash and the 2008 world financial crisis. But now they face possibly the most serious crisis! According to Paul Witkay, the Founder and CEO of the Alliance of CEOs, “Although no one enjoys these crises, my experience has been that times like these force CEOs to think more creatively and generate more counter-intuitive strategies.” In classic Silicon Valley-style, the Alliance of CEOs swung into action in mid-March, by deciding to launch a weekly business sentiment trend analysis with a 1-minute CEO Business Trends Survey. The results are published within 24 to 36 hours of deployment, every week. Their objective is to leverage this weekly trend analysis of how Bay Area CEOs are experiencing the COVID-19 crisis to help them all plan more effectively and make better decisions. Additionally, the survey engagement was designed to provide an easy way to let the CEO Alliance leadership know if their company executives had any questions or challenges that might be helped by someone else in the Alliance community of CEOs. How has your business changed during the pandemic?[emojot type = “button” size=”small” key=”5770bdd408a69b2050a9764f” id=”5770bba70409e08c75a46b04_5ecf8361bcf5270010920cf1″ clientid=”TxflwzfAaMujFELGh_egokuaUnAa” clientsecret=”db6b2R0xXbw9dgU9Ig7pHfh6AMoa”] The CEO Alliance uses the Emojot platform, to efficiently deploy these […]

The Importance of Providing “Great Customer Service”

In any business; restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, cafes, it’s very important to know how customers perceive you and your products. This is because you would want to create a good impression so you can easily get these people to buy from you. According to a study conducted by Conversion, 54% of millennials said they stopped doing business because of poor customer service. Additionally, 50% of Gen Xers and 52% of baby boomers felt the same way.  Any business requires customer engagement, customer loyalty and customer satisfaction to enhance its growth. I doubt that anyone gets up in the morning to say, “I’m going to provide terrible service today.” In fact, the intention usually is to provide good service but somewhere during the actual interaction with customers; we lose that sense of commitment to create an emotional connection and provide an excellent service during each interaction. Here are some things to keep in mind when you are in the process of providing service. Remembering these will help you maintain a high level of service with the understanding that you can’t please everyone. Listen to each customer – You can’t provide excellent service to anyone if you don’t take the time to listen to what the customer is saying. Customers say things and however subtle or incredibly loud it is; you will need to pause and listen to get the message. They are giving you information that you can use to direct you to satisfy their needs. There’s nothing as damaging as not listening and providing products and services that they don’t want or want in the way you are providing them. Act promptly – There’s no point in getting customer feedback if you aren’t prepared to act on the results. If the results show that you need to make a change to how you provide a service or […]

World Emoji Day

In case you missed it, World Emoji Day was July 17th. Yes, in a world where there is an official “day” for just about everything, World Emoji Day is the one day of the year where one is encouraged to go overboard to promote the use of that beloved emojis and spread the enjoyment that they bring to our lives. The first emoji was created in 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer working on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile Internet platform. He was inspired by TV weather forecast symbols, Chinese characters, street signs, and Manga style comics that used stock symbols to express emotions. World Emoji Day was created by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge in 2014 and Emojipedia is the official custodian of this global day. As a backgrounder, July 17 is the date marked on two emoji keyboard symbols—the calendar and the notepad. It was on this day that the iCal  bearing that date was launched at MacWorld Expo in 2002. Last year a wide range of companies adopted emojis in their social media campaigns, including Dominos Pizza, the World Wildlife Fund, and IKEA. Big brands like NASCAR, Victoria’s Secret, the Smithsonian Museum and Disney incorporated emojis into their 2015 product or service offerings to coincide with World Emoji Day. Brands such as Coca-Cola, Spotify, and Starbucks (to name a few) have each paid Twitter over $1 million for custom emoji designs for their ads.

Speaking in Pictures – Emojis, Emoticons and Emotions

The days of communicating with each other using plain old text alone are long gone. Plain text never was quite enough for us. Even in the good old days of Nokia 3310s and a 160 character SMS limit, we’d still find a way to string characters together to form images. It’s the way we are built. We are visual creatures. 30% of our brains are engaged in processing visual information and this has resulted in 63% percent of social media being made up of images. We just connect with images better, whether they are worth a thousand words or are just pictures of grumpy cats. They are more emotionally appealing to us, and we use them to express emotion better- for what is communication without the emotion? It is just plain difficult to express nuance of emotion with text alone. How can you know if someone is being completely serious or tongue-in-cheek without the visual cues that come with face to face conversation? It would be tedious to have to describe your intention every time you typed something, not to mention a complete waste of space. How important is it to speak with pictures(emojis) to express exactly how to feel?   [emojot type = “button” size=”small” key=”5770bdd408a69b2050a9764f” id=”5770bba70409e08c75a46b04_5770d7880409e08c75a46b1f” clientid=”f94_CMbTqFr0bsAIgoHD5PHe4V8a” clientsecret=”Hf5VbRwNRbmt7Bfg3dOyAkILAH4a”] Emojis are pictographs created by the Japanese in the late 1990s. They come from the Japanese words for “picture” and “character” and were used to denote common expressions people made and things they were familiar with. It was genius. Emojis enabled whole new levels and nuances of communication that were just not available before. There’s a whole generation of people, who grew up with online messaging platforms like Yahoo! and MSN Messenger for whom emojis and emoticons are a second language. In fact, according to Professor Evans of Bangor University, emoji […]