The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets

Planes, Trains and Automated Text Analysis

Ursula Lutzky

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350273207
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350090705
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets studies the discursive and pragmatic features of customer service interactions, making use of a corpus of over 1.5 million tweets from more than thirty different companies. With Twitter being used as a professional service channel by many transport operators, this book features an empirical analysis of British and Irish train companies and airlines that provide updates and travel assistance on the platform, often on a 24/7 basis.

From managing crises in the midst of strike action to ensuring passengers feel comfortable on board, Twitter allows transport operators to communicate with their customers in real time. Analysing patterns of language use as well as platform specific features for their communicative functions, Ursula Lutzky enhances our understanding of customers' linguistic expectations on Twitter and of what makes for successful or unsuccessful interaction. Of interest to anyone researching discourse analysis, business communication and social media, this book's findings pave the way for practical applications in customer service.

1

Business discourse and customer service

1.1 Introduction

Trains and, later, planes have exerted a peculiar fascination on travellers for almost two hundred years. As Marchant (2004: 3) notes, in the UK ‘[t]he railway has been a national obsession since 1825’. Railway passengers have witnessed the shift from steam to diesel locomotives and the introduction of electric engines. They have benefitted from the expansion of the railway network, as well as improvements in speed, with local commuter trains offering slower means of public transportation as opposed to high-speed trains reaching up to 300 kilometres per hour (Bradley 2015; Holland 2015). And they have seen the benefits and downsides of the nationalization of British Railways in 1947 and its privatization by 1996, which entailed that ‘a plethora of private operators could buy “slots” to operate trains’ (Salveson 2013: 60), leading to the introduction of various train operating companies as well as their eventual dissolution. Trains have thus been on people’s minds for a long time, but their relationship with trains, which initially started out as a love affair according to Marchant (2004: 3), eventually ran out of steam. The grandeur and romance associated with train travel gave way to disappointment fuelled by strikes, delays and bad quality food (Bradley 2015).

Compared to train travel, flying has a significantly shorter history. While the first commercial flights were operated at the beginning of the twentieth century, air travel only became popular in the 1950s. As a consequence, the relationship that passengers have developed with planes and flying began relatively recently. Nevertheless, shifts in people’s attitudes towards flying have been observed over the last few decades. While people have come into the habit of ‘binge flying’, fuelled in particular by budget airlines’ low ticket prices (Cohen, Higham and Cavaliere 2011), critical voices have called into question the efficiency of air travel, especially due to increased security measures which were introduced in response to the risk of terrorism (see, for example, Hunter and Lambert 2016), as well as the necessity of frequent flying, when considering the considerable harm done to the environment (see, for example, McManners 2012). Thus, the impact that air travel has on climate change has been highlighted (see, for example, Brasseur et al. 2016; Edmunds 2012; Kommenda 2019), and this has raised people’s awareness of alternative means of transport, such as overnight trains (Papa 2020). At the same time, businesses have considered alternative ways of interacting, for example, through video calls, not least during the Covid-19 pandemic (Conroy, McDonnell and Jooss 2020; Rosenthal 2010). Passengers thus find themselves caught in a tension between the benefits of their own travel practice and the negative discourse surrounding excessive air travel and its consequences for climate change.

As attitudes towards train and air travel have changed, so have the media that travellers have at their disposal to voice those attitudes. While passengers previously engaged with train operating companies and airlines by approaching employees for face-to-face conversations or writing letters and emails, they can now make use of a plethora of additional media that offer easy, fast and convenient access to new forms of two-way communication. The introduction of blogs, microblogs, photo- and video-sharing platforms has empowered customers to interact with companies, for example, by leaving a comment on a corporate blog post or contacting them on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. At the same time, it has enabled customers to produce their own content about brands, products and services, and share it with a large audience of online users. Today, customers have plenty of opportunities to talk to and about companies on the internet, and businesses in turn have an interest in monitoring this discourse and in responding to customers in an effective manner.

This book brings these three elements together: trains, planes and the automated text analysis of social media posts. It investigates the use of the microblogging platform Twitter as a channel for customer communication by British and Irish airlines and train operating companies. This is done by adopting a corpus linguistic methodology which allows insights to be gained into topics that are frequently discussed by passengers, their reaction to and perception of companies’ responses to their tweets, as well as their trust in these companies. At the same time, this study deepens our understanding of customer service on Twitter in the respective industries, uncovering which communicative strategies work and which do not, and offering guidance for practitioners on how to improve customer communication on social media. Before engaging in the empirical analysis of tweets, this chapter situates the present study in the field of business discourse, gives an overview of traditional communication types, media and modes used in the world of business, and introduces previous research into customer service and service recovery.

1.2 Communication and business

The importance of communication in the world of business has long been recognized. Communication ‘is at the core of all work-related activities within and across organisations’ and ‘essential for the survival of any organisation’ (Kathpalia and Ling 2014: 274). This is because communication is a means through which relationships are fostered within an organization, among its employees, and beyond the organization with diverse groups of external stakeholders, including customers, governments and the general public. As Zerfass and Viertmann (2017: 72) note, ‘it is common knowledge today that corporate success not only depends on shareholders but also on sustainable relationships with employees, politicians, regulators, customers, mass media, social media influencers, and many other stakeholders.’ Organizations therefore aim to foster strong and healthy relationships among their staff but also between their staff and the outside world, and they have an interest in ensuring that these relationships flourish. Given the central role of communication in this process, it may be regarded as one of any or ganization’s key assets as it directly affects its current and future economic success.

Research has shown that there is a positive correlation between communication and performance-related variables, such as employee productivity and job satisfaction (see, for example, Mohamad et al. 2018: 66). Zhou, Chan and Ou (2018), for instance, investigated whether a company’s communication patterns can provide insights into its performance. Their study was based on the frequency with which key employees at Enron exchanged emails, not taking email contents into account, and they discovered that internal communication patterns were related to corporate performance and allowed for stock price movements to be predicted with relatively high levels of accuracy. In addition, communication supports the creation of intangible resources, such as trust, loyalty and reputation, which may offer an advantage over competitors in the field.

As a consequence, communication has not only become a key focus in organizations’ day-to-day practices but also attracted increased research interest in a range of academic disciplines over the last three decades. Just as the value of communication for corporations is manifold, ‘ranging from building reputation and brands, gaining thought leadership and preventing crises, to stimulating sales or employee motivation’ (Zerfass and Viertmann 2017: 69), so is research in the field. Communication in an organizational context represents a broad area of study that is characterized by its multidisciplinary nature. It has, for instance, been approached from the perspective of management studies, marketing, psychology, sociology, anthropology, communication studies as well as linguistics, and separate, but related research strands have developed in each of these disciplines, some of which are traditionally more distant, while others may be described as cognate. Studies in these strands have been embedded in different theoretical frameworks and have drawn on a diverse range of methodological approaches, resulting in a multidimensional web of research that gives insight into the field from a variety of angles.

In this research context, different terms have been introduced to describe and delineate the respective areas of study focusing on communication in an organizational setting. Louhiala-Salminen (2009: 308; see also Miller 1996) refers to business, corporate, management and organizational communication as ‘the four subdisciplines at the crossroads between communication and organisational life’, and notes that they seem to have been converging rather than diverging in their research focus recently. Apart from communication, the closely related term ‘discourse’ has been used – sometimes interchangeably, sometimes to distinguish research from practice (Mautner 2015: 240) – to refer to the fields of business, corporate, management and organizational discourse (see also Mautner 2017). In addition, research has explored the concepts of professional and workplace discourse (see, for example, Gunnarsson 2009; Köster 2006, 2010a). In the following sections, I discuss three of these main strands of research: business discourse and business communication (see section 1.2.1), corporate communication (section 1.2.2), and workplace discourse (section 1.2.3).

1.2.1 Business discourse and business communication

The disciplines of business discourse and business communication have been described as overlapping and complementary in nature (see, for example, Nickerson 2014: 57). Koller (2018: 526) notes that ‘“communication”, i.e. using language and other modes, such as layout or colour, to interact with others, and “discourse”, i.e. language use as social practice’ may be regarded as sharing the same meaning. Both disciplines are concerned with text and talk produced in a business context (Louhiala-Salminen 2009). They are thus interested in the micro-level at which interlocutors use language and communication to accomplish work-related tasks, such as through the study of speech acts (see also Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson and Planken 2007: 3). In addition to the micro-level, these disciplines also study the macro-level, that is, the role of communication in allowing organizations to reach their goals. While both disciplines account for the context in which communication takes place, studies in business discourse primarily focus on the text and its linguistic features, which may be explained with reference to the context in which they occur. Business communication, on the other hand, places the primary emphasis on context, and this is also reflected in the ‘shared goal’ of business communication research, which pertains to ‘developing and disseminating knowledge that increases the effectiveness and efficiency of business operations’ (Louhiala-Salminen 2009: 307; see also Rogers 2001).

Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999: 2) define business discourse as ‘talk and writing between individuals whose main work activities and interests are in the domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business’. They thus situate business discourse in a corporate setting, which may be physical or virtual, and regard it as including both spoken and written types of communication. They also distinguish business from professional discourse with regard to participants’ roles: all interactants in business discourse have a background in business, whereas professional discourse also involves lay people. While Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999) thus emphasize the presence and active participation of lay people in professional discourse, other studies stress the involvement of at least one professional. Gunnarsson (2009: 5), for instance, defines professional discourse as language used ‘in professional contexts and for professional purposes’; it ‘includes talk involving at least one professional’ as well as ‘written texts produced by professionals and intended for other professionals with the same or different expertise, for semi-professionals, i.e. learners, or for non-professionals, i.e. lay people’. As Darics (2015: 5) points out, however, the distinction between what counts as professional and lay has been blurred in recent years. The introduction of new forms of digital and social media has allowed stakeholders not only to interact with organizations more easily but also to produce their own content about organizations that they can share with a multitude of other stakeholders (see in particular the discussion in Chapter 2).

1.2.2 Corporate communication

Corporate communication originally evolved from the field of public relations and has been associated with studying corporate identity, image and reputation, as well as with finding ways in which they can be created, protected or maintained. Cornelissen (2017: 5) defines corporate communication as ‘a management function that offers a framework for the effective coordination of all internal and external communication with the overall purpose of establishing and maintaining favourable reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is dependent’. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with business communication (see, for example, Koller 2018: 526) and, like business communication, corporate communication has been used as an umbrella term for several other areas of communication practice and research, such as management, marketing and organizational communication (see, for example, van Riel 1995; van Riel and Fombrun 2007).

Frandsen and Johansen (2014: 223) distinguish corporate communication from the related disciplines by emphasizing that it offers a strategic approach to communication, involves all types of stakeholders, and aims to integrate external and internal communication activities. In comparison, marketing communication tends to focus on a specific group of stakeholders, that is, customers, and public relations has mainly been concerned with external communication, such as with the media. On the other hand, organizational communication primarily involves internal communication, and business communication, in contrast to corporate communication, does not take a strategic but more of an operational approach. Similar to Louhiala-Salminen (2009: 308), however, Frandsen and Johansen (2014: 224) also observe ‘a new and promising tendency to “build bridges” between one or more of these disciplines’. Likewise, Christensen and Cornelissen (2011) argue for bridging the gap between corporate and organizational communication and discuss the potential for greater ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Business discourse and customer service
• 2 Digital discourse and customer communication
• 3 Twitter, corpora and ethics
• 4 The language of customer service tweets
• 5 Customer service exchanges and their perception
• 6 Hashtags in customer service discourse
• 7 Crisis communication on Twitter
• 8 Implications and applications
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright