Abstract
Linguistic approaches to service encounters (SEs) often go beyond their transactional goals to focus on the interactional aspect of the exchange between participants, providing insights into the nuanced interpersonal and relational variation and management therein. Most research within this genre has analyzed face-to-face interaction, but the rise of globalised practices such as outsourcing (i.e. hiring a party outside the company for services and goods that were traditionally in-house) have made it increasingly necessary to extend this into technology-mediated exchanges. This volume focuses on how these technologies shape the linguistic behaviours of service providers and customers driven by their interactional goals in SEs.
For this purpose, the authors primarily use pragmatic theories to investigate SEs mediated via different digital devices, including phone apps, telephone and online. The book draws on data collected from an array of sources and approaches these data using a wide range of research methodologies comprising ethnography, conversation analysis and discourse analysis, in order to unpack the specific linguistic features of this genre as mediated by technology. The volume consists of nine chapters, divided into three distinct parts: social services (in this case, health care and interpretation); call centres; and e-service encounters.
De Wilde and colleagues demonstrate in Chapter 1 that, although mobile apps and phone technology provide communicative convenience for both service seekers and providers – such as explaining abstract ideas, clarifying words and helping to build emotional connections – there is an increasing need for the service provider to adapt to mediated SEs through training to improve providers’ confidence. Lázaro Gutiérrez and Cabrera Méndez present in Chapter 2 a case of how professional interpreters deduce an appropriate context in a remote interpreting event (i.e. understanding the physical location of the interlocutors and who they are), and offer suggestions for further training for service providers in related activities.
In the phone-mediated business service encounters in part 2, the skills of the service provider seem to be as key as in face-to-face interaction. Call centre staff must empathise with the customer callers, as demonstrated in Chapter 4 by Hultgren, who shows that this is not a matter of a specific culture, but a global phenomenon: call agents across cultures include a list of interpersonal management strategies for training their staff, although other strategies are locally adopted. Spatially dislocated communication has some unique features that differ from face-to-face interactions and need to be handled accordingly. For example, Márquez Reiter shows in Chapter 5 how conversational ambiguity is deliberately produced in telephone marketing activity in order to reduce the possibility of being declined by the recipient of the call, and keeping them on the line. In a similar way, Edmonds and Weatherall in Chapter 3 discuss the management of multiactivity – verbal and embodied conduct in order to maintain and promote conversational progression without having to suspend or terminate a call to a helpline service. In an inequitable call conversation between non-English-speaking call agents and English–speaking consumers (as described by Mugford in Chapter 6), the agents can exploit synthetic strategies (such as pseudo-intimacy and face-boosting acts) to a great extent than clients, but this inequitable relationship provokes aggressiveness from the customers; this presents a challenge for agents to determine whether or not this behaviour can be accepted as a part of their business practice.
Electronic transactions are the focus of Part 3. A key message it delivers is that, despite anonymity and unfamiliarity, participants still tend to show interpersonal concern to each other. In chapter 7, Placencia shows how participants in an electronic transaction (refusals of offers by online buyers) use a range of mitigating strategies such as greetings to self-construct as friendly and respectful. These behaviours are believed to be driven by transactional goals, for example, treating buyers as potential customers, provoking good reviews. There are also other factors at play because of the site, that is, discouraging inappropriate questions and answers. When mediated by a social networking site where multidirectional communication is allowed (such as Facebook, discussed in Chapter 9 by Bou-Franch, and Amazon, the focus of Chapter 8 by Ren) exchanges between customers engage in community bonding through similar language usage or evoking sympathy. Ren analyses different forms of intensifications in online reviews, in which anonymity enables customers to exploit linguistic resources to realise communicative goals. This mode of multidirectional communication also ties customers closely under shared values, which may create extra pressure for the seller to pay attention to their linguistic behaviours; Bou-Franch discusses how any inappropriate communication from the seller (such as sexism) may potentially cause moral disputes with customers as a whole.
The book shows how some interactional aspects of technology mediated SEs show similar features to their face-to-face form, while others are redefined under the influence of technology. It is one of the first books to examine linguistic behaviours within the genre of remote SEs to derive an understanding of the diversity of language, and analyse the trajectories of its functions for provoking positive personal evaluations to serve material transactional goals in a direct or indirect manner. It can be of use to business practitioners, who can draw on the findings of interactional features in technology-mediated SEs to establish business policy/guidance and promote business activities, as well as to students interested in the linguistic management of service industries, especially in its remote versions.