Article published In:
Pragmatics and SocietyVol. 6:1 (2015) ► pp.67–88
Closing the gap in customer service encounters
Customers’ use of upshot formulations to manage service responses
Within the context of service inquiries, and the specialized inferential logic associated with the particularized activities (Levinson 1992) there is a gap in the orientations of customers and service representatives. Specifically, one problem that arises in customer service encounters is that customers and service representatives appear to arrive at different understandings of what constitutes a relevant response to a service inquiry. By examining one type of customer service context, calls to an electronic repair facility, this article offers a conversation analytic account of how customers use formulations to collaboratively achieve a mutually agreed upon answer to their service inquiry and close the gap in the underlying logics that emerge in these calls.
References (40)
Antaki, Charles. 2008. “Formulations in Psychotherapy.” In Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy, ed. by Anssi Peräkylä, Charles Antaki, Sanna Vehviläinen, and Ivan Leudar, 26–42. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Antaki, Charles, Rebecca Barnes, and Ivan Leudar. 2005. “Diagnostic Formulations in Psychotherapy.” Discourse Studies 7 (6): 627–647.
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and John Heritage. 1984. “Transcript Notation.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, ix–xvi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi, and Jeffrey D. Robinson. 2012. “Exploring Essentially Three-turn Courses of Action: An Institutional Case Study with Implications for Ordinary Talk.” Discourse Studies 14 (3): 217–241.
Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi, Jeffrey D. Robinson, and Jenny Mandelbaum. 2011. “Extending the Notion of Pragmatic Completion: The Case of the Compound Action Unit.” Journal of Pragmatics 431: 3844–3859.
Bolden, Galina. 2010. “‘Articulating the Unsaid’ via And-prefaced Formulations of Other’s Talk.” Discourse Studies 12 (1): 5–32.
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage. 1992. “Analyzing Talk at Work: An Introduction.” In Talk at Work, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 3–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, Paul. 2003. “Precision and Exaggeration in Interaction.” American Sociological Review 681: 917–938.
Ford, Cecilia E., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1996. “lnteractional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 134–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fitzsimmons, James A., and Mona J. Fitzsimmons. 1998. Service Management: Operations, Strategy, and Information Technology (2nd edition). Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill.
Gutek, Barbara. 1995. The Dynamics of Service: Reflections on the Changing Nature of Customer/Provider Interactions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Heritage, John. 1984. “A Change of State Token and Aspects of its Sequential Placement.” In Structures of Social Action, ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 299–345.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1985. “Analyzing News Interviews: Aspects of the Production of Talk for an Overhearing Audience. In Handbook of Discourse Analysis Vol. 31, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 95–119. New York: Academic Press.
Heritage, John, and Tanya Stivers. 1999. “Online Commentary in Acute Medical Visits: A Method of Shaping Patient Expectations.” Social Science and Medicine 49 (11): 1501–1517.
Heritage, John, and Rod D. Watson. 1979. “Formulations as Conversational Objects.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 123–162. New York: Irvington.
Hutchby, Ian. 2005. “Active Listening: Formulations and the Elicitation of Feelings-talk in Child Counseling.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 38 (3): 303–329.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “A Sketch of Some Orderly Aspects of Overlap in Natural Conversation.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 43–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Labov, William, and David Fanshel. 1977. Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York: Academic Press.
Lam, Phoenix. 2010. “Toward a Functional Framework for Discourse Particles: A Comparison of ‘Well’ and ‘So’.” Text & Talk 30 (6): 657–677.
Lerner, Gene. 2004. “On the Place of Linguistic Resources in the Organization of Talk-in-Interaction: Grammar as Action in Prompting a Speaker to Elaborate.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37 (2): 151–184.
Levinson, Stephen. 1992. “Activity Type and Language.” In Talk at Work, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maynard, Douglas W. 1992. “On clinicians co-implicating recipients’ perspective in the delivery of diagnostic news.” In Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 331–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nielsen, Mie Femø, Søren Beck Nielsen, Gitte Gravengaard, and Brian Due. 2012. “Interactional Functions of Invoking Procedure in Institutional Settings.” Journal of Pragmatics 441: 1457–1473.
Normann, Richard. 1984. Service Management: Strategy and Leadership in Service Business (2nd ed.). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Peräkylä, Anssi. 2011. “After Interpretation: Third-position Utterances in Psychoanalysis.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 44 (3): 288–316.
Pomerantz, Anita. 1986. “Extreme case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims.” Human Studies 91: 219–229.
Raymond, Geoffrey. 2003. “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structures of Responding.” American Sociological Review 68 (6): 939–967.
. 2004. “Prompting Action: The Stand-alone ‘So’ in Sequences of Talk-in-Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 73 (2): 185–218.
Robinson, Jeffrey D., and John Heritage. 2005. “The Structure of Patients’ Presenting Concerns: The Completion Relevance of Current Symptoms.” Social Science & Medicine 611: 481–493.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1988. “Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation.” In Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. by Paul Drew and Anthony J. Wootton, 89–135.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
. 1996. “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Sandra Thompson and Emanuel A. Schegloff, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2005. “On Complainability”. Social Problems 52 (3): 449–476.
. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers: Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Steensig, Jakob, and Tine Larsen. 2008. “Affilliative and Disaffillative Uses of You Say x Questions.” Discourse Studies 10 (1): 113–132.
Stivers, Tanya. 2005. “Non-antibiotic Treatment Recommendations: Delivery Formats and Implications for Parent Resistance.” Social Science & Medicine 601: 949–946.
Zimmerman, Don. 1992. “The interactional organization of calls c::/ for emergency assistance.” In Talk at Work, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 418–469. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2006. “How closing matters in emergency calls.” Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association
, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Orthaber, Sara
2023. Routine Calls for Information and Request Emails. In (Im)politeness at a Slovenian Call Centre [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 97 ff. 
Boginskaya, Olga
2022. Popularizing in legal discourse: What efforts do Russian judges make to facilitate juror’s comprehension of law-related contents?. Discourse Studies 24:5 ► pp. 527 ff.
Herijgers, Marloes & Tessa van Charldorp
2021. Communicating information packages in institutional face-to-face consultations. Discourse Studies 23:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Chen, Jessie & Scott Barnes
2020. Giving information in cosmetics sales interactions: Exploring some interactional functions of the Mandarin response token dui. Journal of Pragmatics 159 ► pp. 12 ff.
Kent, Alexandra & Charles Antaki
2020. Police Call-takers' First Substantive Question Projects the Outcome of the Call. Applied Linguistics 41:5 ► pp. 640 ff.
Márquez Reiter, Rosina
2019. Chapter 5. Navigating commercial constraints in a service call. In Technology Mediated Service Encounters [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 300], ► pp. 121 ff.
Sikveland, Rein Ove & Elizabeth Stokoe
2017. Enquiry calls to GP surgeries in the United Kingdom: Expressions of incomplete service and dissatisfaction in closing sequences. Discourse Studies 19:4 ► pp. 441 ff.
Orthaber, Sara & Rosina Márquez Reiter
2016. When routine calls for information become interpersonally sensitive. Pragmatics and Society 7:4 ► pp. 638 ff.
Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi
2015. What Can You Do for Me? Communication Methods Customers Use to Solicit Personalization within the Service Encounter. Communication Monographs 82:4 ► pp. 510 ff.
Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi
2015. Working the overall structural organization of a call: How customers use third position as leverage for gaining service representatives' assistance in dealing with service problems. Language & Communication 43 ► pp. 47 ff.
Kevoe-Feldman, Heidi
2018. The interactional work of suppressing complaints in customer service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics 123 ► pp. 102 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.