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Routine Calls for Information and Request Emails

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(Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre

Part of the book series: Advances in (Im)politeness Studies ((AIMS))

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Abstract

This chapter explores routine interactions between customers and agents in two mediated settings of the Slovenian rail services: the call centre that provides general information via telephone and a contact centre that responds to customers’ request emails. For this reason, the chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, we examine politeness and facework in inbound calls where customers request information about train services. Drawing on extant knowledge on institutional calls from previous studies, the recurrent actions that the participants undertake are examined, paying attention to the preference principles the interlocutors employ. In light of existing studies, the main characteristics of calls are outlined and their relevance to the current study is discussed. To illustrate what is normatively expected in this setting and to point out the places and actions in interaction in which interactional trouble may occur, a microanalysis of individual sequences of the calls is undertaken (i.e., openings, the opening request and responses, and closings). The second part examines customers’ and agents’ communicative email practices. Building on previous studies, it outlines the structure of emails and illustrates the practices and organisation of request emails and responses. This is followed by a discussion of the relationship between politeness and agents’ response time. Finally, we review and compare the findings from request emails with those from the calls for information.

Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.

—James Cash Penney.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As prospective (paying) customers.

  2. 2.

    See Chapter 4, Sect. 4.3.1, Table 4.3.

  3. 3.

    When looking at the different ways in which the agents respond to the summons, it becomes evident that should the agents in fact have a script regarding how to manage calls, they are not following the guidelines.

  4. 4.

    The latter is the least common, as it is typically used to check if the telephone connection had been lost.

  5. 5.

    This is in line with the previous findings which found that look-prefaced turns (e.g., Excerpt 5, l. 02) suggest that more is to come from the customer (e.g., Márquez Reiter, 2011; Sidnell, 2007).

  6. 6.

    For instance, Agent 2 (90 calls) and Agent 4 (60 calls) most frequently returned a greeting proffered by the customer. Agent 1 and 3 did so on far fewer occasions, i.e., on 9 (of 90 calls) and 7 (of 60 calls) occasions, respectively.

  7. 7.

    For contrastive purposes, I observed calls made to a hair stylist who agreed to co-operate in this observation.

  8. 8.

    Moreover, repetition in service calls was also found to play a relevant role when information is received, allowing the speaker to take time to think about what to do next (Varcasia, 2013: 57).

  9. 9.

    Although differences are likely to occur should the participants know one another, no such instances were observed in the data.

  10. 10.

    Evaluations of one or both participants, the analyst or others (forum users and the like).

  11. 11.

    As was evident from the data, the agents rotate, which means that when several exchanges occur, different agents respond to the message.

  12. 12.

    Such structured forms, in turn, reduce the agents’ routine input in each email and thus the overall workload in that it increases the efficiency of processing and organizing messages and thus information transfer (e.g., Camino, Milewski, Millen, and Smith, 1998).

  13. 13.

    Given that the dataset includes very few non-initial emails, opening and closing sequences were not grouped separately to look for any differences between initial and non-initial emails.

  14. 14.

    However, the author does not specify how a particular workplace culture is defined or measured.

  15. 15.

    In the literature, such distancing mechanisms that mitigate potential face-threats were labelled as part of the negative politeness strategy (e.g., Brown and Levinson, 1987; see also Bosch Abarca and Giménez Moreno, 2006).

  16. 16.

    In one case an embedded timetable was 8 pages long.

  17. 17.

    The politeness marker “please” was used 32 times in the corpus (in 26 of 88 request emails).

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  1. Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Sara Orthaber

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Orthaber, S. (2023). Routine Calls for Information and Request Emails. In: (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre. Advances in (Im)politeness Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43320-7_5

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