Chapter published in:
Technology Mediated Service Encounters
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lucía Fernández-Amaya and María de la O Hernández-López
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 300] 2019
► pp. 121–144

Chapter 5
Navigating commercial constraints in a service call

In this chapter I examine a call from a telephone agent to a client in which the former tries to obtain a sale irrespective of the client’s interest in the product and, the latter seizes this opportunity to obtain access to a product that she is not entitled to. A central aspect of the organization of the exchange examined is, on the one hand, that it is never clear if the client is ready to proceed with the depositing of one of the products, and, on the other hand, that the agent remains ambiguous as to the rights that depositing the product in question would give the client. In view of this, the chapter explores how the conversational participants avoid explicitly stating what each will do or indeed offer before they can determine what the other party will give in exchange. The chapter thus contributes to the literature on (mediated) service encounters by shedding empirical light on how conversational participants create and maintain ambiguity to pursue different commercial agendas.

Keywords: ambiguity, camouflage, explicitness, preliminaries
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on service calls
  • 3.Background and methodological preliminaries
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Creating and maintaining ambiguity
    • 4.2Exploring an alternative sales route
    • 4.3Encountering a persistent client
    • 4.4Presenting oneself as knowledgeable
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Glossary
Published online: 10 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.300.05mar
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