Customer service through an interactional lens: the status of status inquiries in a camera repair shop

This study uses conversation analysis to examine the organization of responses to Customers’ repair status inquiries in customer service calls to a camera repair shop. Using as data 193 recorded phone calls to a customer service center in a camera repair shop, the analysis describes practices participants use to jointly construct a multi componential response to repair status inquiries as a conditionally relevant response, and demonstrates how participants orient to this type of response as a normative organizational structure. Findings of this study reveal that participants treat the action of inquiring about repair status as making relevant a response that contains two separate components, as a single response, where each component reports a different type of repair status. The first component of the response is a report of where the item that is in for repair is currently in the repair process, and the second is a report of the estimated repair completion time. Together, these two reports constitute the normative organizational response to a repair status inquiry. In addition, this study shows how response also constitutes an organizational structure that is produced in and through interaction. A second set of findings suggests that customers treat the organizational response to repair status inquiries for how it bears on another type of status, which is the delivery time, or when customers can expect to receive their equipment back from the organization. This second set of findings reveals how participants manage organizational knowledge and what assumptions customers make about what organizational members might know. Within organizational communication, structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) focuses on the duality of the structure provided by the organization, such as rules and resources, and the agency of the actors that represents the autonomy of human agents to produce action. Giddens (1984) argued that as participants create their own normative, organizing structure through which they produce and reproduce conditions for achieving particular goals within a given encounter, their interaction is also influenced by the rules and resources provided by the organization. Thus, as members draw on organizational resources when they produce social actions, their actions simultaneously reproduce the organizational structure itself. By examining the details of actual interaction, this study moves from a theoretical framework to an examination of how members produce action, and documents how organizational structures are produced through talk. This study contributes to the growing body of research that examines how organizational processes and constructs are built through discourse in organizations (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). Findings about the organization of responses to status inquiries further conversation analytic research by describing previously undiscovered features of responding actions. The study also provides insight into how specific features of communication processes contribute to the provision of “customer service.”Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-193)by Heidi Kevoe Feldma

Emergency or Not? Dealing with Borderline Cases in Emergency Police Calls

We examine occasions when callers phone emergency services yet preface their reason for calling as ‘not an emergency’. Data are phone calls to US (911) and UK (999) emergency lines and UK (101) non-emergency police lines. Data has been transcribed using Jefferson conventions and analysed using conversation analysis. The ‘not an emergency’ formulation is recurrently used to mark a shaky or borderline fit between the caller’s situation and the emergency category presumed by the dedicated phoneline. Typically, ‘not an emergency’ formulations prefaced descriptions of a possible emergency in which the caller balances the justification for the call on the boundary of what counts as an emergency. Recurrent concerns for callers using “not an emergency” are to manage pre-emptive calls about impending potential emergency, and to disclaim responsibility for the decision to call an emergency service. Call takers offer callers latitude to present a complicated description of their circumstances instead of swiftly sanctioning them for an inappropriate call. Our paper contributes to work on how the boundaries between categories are constructed and negotiated in interaction. Data are in British and American English

Overcoming Suicidal Persons’ Resistance Using Productive Communicative Challenges during Police Crisis Negotiations

This paper reveals how negotiators, from the police and emergency call centres, overcome resistance towards the negotiation from suicidal persons in crisis. Communication guidance to hostage and crisis negotiators recommends against challenging the person in crisis, focusing instead on a softer, rapportful approach. Using conversation analysis, we investigate how negotiators deal with resistance, turn by turn, in encounters collected from British police negotiators’ field recordings, and American police 9-1-1 dispatch telephone calls. In contrast to existing communication guidance, we show that and how challenges can be productive for bringing about positive shifts in suicidal persons’ behaviour. We demonstrate how negotiators challenge the reasoning in their interlocutors’ resistant responses and leverage these challenges productively in the next turn. By studying real (rather than hypothetical or simulated) negotiations, the study reveals the tacit expertise of negotiators and the communicative practices that optimize negotiation outcomes. These research findings have significant implications for existing communication guidance showing how negotiations are managed locally through the linguistic design of turns of talk

Overcoming suicidal persons’ resistance using productive communicative challenges during police crisis negotiations

This paper reveals how negotiators, from the police and emergency call centres, overcome resistance towards the negotiation from suicidal persons in crisis. Communication guidance to hostage and crisis negotiators recommends against challenging the person in crisis, focusing instead on a softer, rapportful approach. Using conversation analysis, we investigate how negotiators deal with resistance, turn by turn, in encounters collected from British police negotiators’ field recordings, and American police 9-1-1 dispatch telephone calls. In contrast to existing communication guidance, we show that and how challenges can be productive for bringing about positive shifts in suicidal persons’ behaviour. We demonstrate how negotiators challenge the reasoning in their interlocutors’ resistant responses and leverage these challenges productively in the next turn. By studying real (rather than hypothetical or simulated) negotiations, the study reveals the tacit expertise of negotiators and the communicative practices that optimize negotiation outcomes. These research findings have significant implications for existing communication guidance showing how negotiations are managed locally through the linguistic design of turns of talk

When delayed responses are productive: Being persuaded following resistance in conversation

Conversation analysts have long since demonstrated that, in responding to an initiating action (e.g., question), recipients have at least two ways to respond; response options (e.g., answer, non-answer) are not equivalent, and ‘preferred’ responses are typically delivered more rapidly than ‘dispreferred’ responses. This paper examines cases in which ‘preferred’ responses, which progress the preceding actions in productive alignment, are delayed. We combined and analysed four British and American English datasets: mediators talking to potential clients; police negotiators talking to suicidal persons in crisis; calls to emergency services from suicidal persons, and salespeople talking to potential customers. Our analysis revealed that, when one party has resisted the project of the other, delay may indicate an upcoming productive response. Such delays break the sequence's contiguity, thus producing (some) structural independence from a previously dismissed course of action and enabling the speaker to maintain (some) ‘face’, in Goffman's terms. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding alignment and preference in conversation analysis, and the practices of resistance and persuasion more generally

Reformulating place

This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk,and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action

Reformulating place

This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk,and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action