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File name: WAA ep 4 V1 Audio Length: 0:39:05Date transcribed: 2 December 2019

Bernard: Hello everyone. Welcome to the fourth episode of our Words & Actions

podcast, in which we focus on the importance of language in

business, politics and beyond.

First of all, I would like to apologise for my somewhat nasal voice. I'm

not sure how annoying it is but at least I wanted to apologise for that.

Now, those of you who know the format will know by now that we first

have an introduction with a couple of examples and references to

literature, we also have an expert who we interview in the second part

of this podcast and then we have a bit of data analysis.

Just to remind you that we also have a website where you can find

these references, more information and, actually, full transcripts of the

episodes and you can still follow us on Twitter.

The hosts of this podcast are Erika Darics, Veronika Koller and me,

Bernard De Clerck, and today, we will be talking about a very nice

topic, actually, the importance of language in interactions with

customers. And we all have our experiences with good and bad

customer service, don’t we?

Good morning, Veronika, good morning, Erika.

Veronika: Good morning, good morning.

Erika: Hi, everyone, hi. This is Erika calling in from Birmingham.

Veronika: Yes, and this is Veronika at Lancaster University. So, today it’s about

talking to customers from a company’s point of view. As Bernard said,

we all have positive and negative experiences during customer

service exchanges. We probably can come up with a few straight

away. And if you want to share them with us, absolutely, on our blog or

via Twitter, please do.

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www.transcriptioncentre.co.uk

We may have these experiences as a customer, most of us I reckon,

but also some of us as a service provider. And as such, we all know

that, of course, it’s important what you say but it’s just as, if not more,

important how you say things during these interactions.

Erika: Tell us about this.

Veronika: There are so many ways you can get it right or wrong, really, be too

informal, too formal, not polite enough, all that sort of thing, really.

So today, we’re looking at aspects of language use that can really

make or break good customer service and what are the consequences

of this for, say, customer satisfaction or loyalty or intentions to buy a

product or service again from a particular provider.

One issue is appropriateness. So, for instance, would you consider it

appropriate if Marriott, the upmarket hotel chain, used an emoji in their

communications with you? Would you find that appropriate, Erika and

Bernard?

Erika: I don’t have any problems with emojis. I know it has caused a lot of

uproar in popular media and people have differing expectations about

emojis but I think it’s a very, very important little thing that helps to

achieve an informal, casual kind of tone in communication, which most

companies now try to do, be informal with customers.

Bernard: To be honest, I'm not a regular Marriott customer, let’s say, so I'm not

sure what the Marriott customer would think about this. They expect

this kind of level of quality and I'm not sure whether people would

associate the use of an emoji as a kind of quality you would expect in

language.

So, there we go, already one example.

Veronika: There’s one question here, if you’re more upmarket should you be

more formal, perhaps?

Anyway. So, another thing that we’re going to look at in detail for this

episode is politeness in customer exchanges. It seems obvious,

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doesn’t it, nobody would be rude to a customer. But the other way

round, mm, not so sure. I mean, people who work in call centres

probably have stories to tell about this, really.

But in any case, what counts as polite is very specific to the context. It

has to do with the individuals involved, the kind of organisation and

even the brand but also, of course, regional and cultural issues. And it

differs a lot between whether you’re in a shop and have a face-to-face

interaction or whether you have a sort of online interaction, say on

Facebook or in some sort of web chat. So, that makes a huge

difference for politeness as well.

So, we’ll be talking about these aspects with an expert in politeness

and, indeed, impoliteness, Jonathan Culpeper, later on in the

programme today. But I think before that, Erika has a surprise for us.

(Musical interlude)

Erika: Well, I think I know just the right person to share inside knowledge

about how customer service works. I worked with Jane Lockwood on a

project recently. Jane works in the Department of English in Hong

Kong Polytechnic University, but today, we’re chatting to her in her role

as a consultant. She’s worked with offshore customer service

providers in a number of places like the Philippines, in Malaysia,

helping both traditional call centres and the centres where people use

instant messaging to do customer service.

Welcome on the show, Jane.

Jane: Thank you, very pleased to be here.

Veronika: Yeah, it’s great to have you. A lot of your work has been on call

centres but we are particularly interested in what happens when

customer service agents have online chats with customers. So, in your

consulting work, what are some of the common problems that these

customer service agents face when they chat online with customers?

Jane: Well, one of the problems that web chat agents have is that they have

generally been used to serving customers with voice and as you

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know, with voice you have many pragmatic affordances like intonation,

word stress, pronunciation of words and so forth. And so, on web chat,

you lose that affordance of voice so pragmatic meanings are much

more difficult for them to communicate.

But one of the main problems, I think, in the online chat is now the

management requirements that have been put in place as a result of

more agents moving from voice to web chat. And that is that we know

a lot about social media strategies for communication, for example,

the use of emoticons and emojis, abbreviations, punctuation, you

know, capital letters and so forth. But generally speaking,

management requires their web chat agents not to use these social

media strategies because they fear that customers will think that

they’re talking to 17 year olds.

So, they just don’t have those strategies that they would have in their

normal social lives that they can apply to the professional context. And

this means that the web chat agents need to be using language;

they’re encouraged to use long sentences so that they sound suitably

formal and so forth.

But the other management requirement for web chats that is also

problematic is that given that web chats take five, six, seven times

longer than voice, the management are requiring web chat agents to

do what they call concurrent chats, which means that you have to

simultaneously be communicating with customers, maybe two, three,

four,, five customers at any one time and as you know if you had to do

a face-to-face customer exchange and you had five people talking to

you at the same time, it becomes extremely difficult.

So, those are just a couple of things.

Veronika: And probably, also, they sometimes do it in not their first language,

right?

Jane: Exactly. So, I’ve been working, as Erika said, I’ve been working in the

Philippines and India, particularly in the area of web chat support and

so they’re doing this in a second language. So again, web chat

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is extremely difficult for second language speakers and in this

case, they’re readers, now, of course. So, being able to pick up the

nuance of what a customer is feeling, for example, in a web chat

exchange is extremely challenging for second… well, I would argue

for first as well as second language communicators.

Bernard: So, basically, these people have fewer linguistic devices to engage in

communication because they can’t use the emoji and the

capitalisation, that’s one thing and secondly, they might not have the

linguistic sophistication of an L1 speaker.

Veronika: So, speaker of a first language, yeah, English as a first language.

Bernard: Are people actually more forgiving in that context? Are they aware of

these things that you’ve just shared with us or not?

Jane: Yes, of course. I mean, outsourcing and offshoring, which is what is

happening in customer service, is now 20 years old. And when voice

was started, of course, the customer could detect an accent and they

knew immediately that the agent wasn’t domiciled in America or the

UK or wherever the head office was.

So, there was a lot of harassment of contact centre agents when

telephonic exchange happened and there was special training in how

to deal with this kind of harassment.

In a second language, it’s a little bit more difficult to detect this

because I would argue that actually, L1 readers of chat exchange

probably experience very similar difficulties that the L2 readers have.

Veronika: Thank you for that. I mean, that was really just a quick one to kick off

our episode for today for talk about customers. But it’s really great to

get a perspective from somebody who has not only done academic

work on this but also worked as a consultant in exactly these kinds of

situations that you’ve been talking about.

Erika: Thank you, Jane, thanks for being with us.

Jane: Okay, not at all, not at all.

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Veronika: Thanks a lot.

(Musical interlude)

Bernard: So, that was a very interesting chat with Jane and what you can see

there immediately is the importance of context that we referred to. So,

in her case, she was referring to the fact that people are not allowed to

use emojis, for instance, which has huge repercussions on what they

can actually say in terms of interpersonal interactions.

Maybe, if we go back to context and getting things right or wrong in

customer service, one of the basic questions that needs to be

answered, I think, from the start in this globalised market that we live

in is the choice of language. And I’ve got two interesting studies that

focus on language choice. One of them is by Patrick Goethals and

what he did is he focused on 11,000 hotel reviews, so reviews by

customers who had stayed at a hotel in Flanders, and he looked at

Spanish customers, French customers and German customers. And

more specifically, he looked at comments on language. And what he

noticed is that Spanish people, overall, are fairly positive when being

addressed in their mother tongue so they really, really appreciate that.

Now, French people are more negative. Not only do they kind of

expect people to address them in French, especially in Belgium,

because they know it’s a country with three official languages but they

kind of expect people to address them in French. But they also expect

a kind of quality, a certain level of proficiency, which is not the case, of

course, for the Spanish people.

And then, when we go to the German customers, you see no

comments whatsoever regarding the language. So, they don’t expect

people to address them in their mother tongue, they just go for English

and that’s basically it.

Veronika: I think that sounds completely right, having grown up in Germany, that

sounds completely what you would do.

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Bernard: So, the takeaway message for people who run hotels or customer

service providers would be that depending on the culture and the

country and the language that people speak, whether or not

you address them in their mother tongue is more or less important.

So, for French people, it’s important to address them in French, for

German people, you could do it in English and Spanish people are

happy just with a couple of words in Spanish. So, that was one

interesting study.

The second one actually looked into Brussels and the bilingual

situation that we have in Brussels and whether or not people actually

tip more if you address them in their native language.

Veronika: It’s either Dutch or French, yeah.

Erika: I really like the title of this study. It says, “Speak my language if you

want my money.”

Bernard: Yeah. And especially in Brussels, that’s a sensitive issue because

normally… well, people expect a bilingual situation, right? Many

people still speak French in Brussels and then what happens when

Flemish people go to Brussels, you know, they expect people to

address them in Dutch because, after all, it’s bilingual.

What the study showed is that when they don’t address them in Dutch,

the tips go down. So, when they’re spoken to in French, the tips go

down.

Veronika: I mean, that’s a fascinating example of how you can really turn

language use into money and how language itself almost becomes a

commodity.

Bernard: Absolutely, yeah.

Erika: Right. But what do you do when all this happens online, right? It’s not

local, it can be global, anyone can talk to anyone.

Veronika: You may have a situation where the customer service agent speaks in

a second language or they use so-called lingua franca, just a

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language that they can all communicate in. So, that’s quite different,

yeah.

Erika: And because of all the mixing of various languages and cultures, this

becomes a really hard situation for companies and service

providers to deal with or address because anybody can talk to anyone

but they have to do it in a way that everybody is happy and people

continue to use the service.

Veronika: What you also have, of course, is, with these changing

technologies and, you know, web chats with customers now, you don’t

have a one-way dialogue anymore, even online and you have,

perhaps, more of a mix of the purely transactional where you just get

the business done, with the relational where you do it a bit more

interpersonally and sort of build rapport.

And when you look at what academics have written about service

encounters, they have made the point that your typical service

encounter is actually sort of halfway between an informal conversation

or a sort of more institutional interaction, really. And that can be very

different, some are more transactional, more of, “Let’s just get the

stuff we want to do done,” and some are much more focused on the

personal side.

So, you have to be both sociable and efficient, in a way and you have

to do a lot of what’s known as rapport management. And again, that

has direct consequences. It has to do with customers’ intention to buy

and loyalty but also, sometimes, with publicity for the company.

Erika: Right. And as we heard from Jane, this kind of rapport management

is, actually, a very hard thing to do, especially if you get guidelines

from the company about just how informal you can be and as a

consultant or someone who works with companies, I know that

sometimes, these guidelines, these communication guidelines can be

quite misleading. I quite like when communication professionals are

told to be conversational and that’s all they get.

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Veronika: What does that mean? In spoken interaction with customers, it can

mean that you start with your typical greetings so, “Hi, how are you?

I'm fine, what about you?” That’s known as phatic communication. And

then you get down to the business at hand but you may expand on

that by doing something a bit more relational, for instance, praising the

product or whatever it is.

So, it’s very flexible and you can’t really capture that in a script, can

you?

Bernard: That’s true. And apart from politeness and getting the tone right and

using the right balance between formality and informality, what I’ve

also noticed online is that creativity in language use seems to be very

important as well. Maybe not so much in actual hardcore complaint

situations but in more playful situations where customers are reaching

out to the company. And then I think it’s a nice opportunity for

companies to use that creativity and I’ll give you one example.

This is from a guy and his name is Shane, he tweeted to Samsung,

Canada and this is what he tweeted; he said, “Hello, I have bought

many Samsung products,” this is what he wanted to underscore right

from the start. “I currently have a Samsung LCD TV, Samsung

Galaxy S, Samsung laptop. I was just wondering if you could get me a

free Galaxy S III? I have attached a picture of a dragon I just drew for

you.”

And then you see this silly picture of a dragon…

Veronika: It’s really quite cute. It’s like a child’s painting of a cutesy little dragon

but still spitting fire, you know.

Bernard: Yes, and it says, “RAWR.”

Veronika: We have it on our website, obviously.

Bernard: Yes, it will be on the website. But the question then is as a company,

how do you respond to that? Do you keep it dry on the surface and

say, “No, if we do that we will run out of business?” You know, that’s

not very nice and customer-friendly.

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So, the kind of bonding that we were talking about is exactly what the

customer service agent did. In his reply, he went for the apology, “I'm

sure that you realise that we can’t actually do this but your drawing of

the dragon is so epic that we’re returning the favour. Please find

attached a drawing of a kangaroo on a unicycle.”

Veronika: It gets really quite absurd, you know?

Bernard: Then you can actually see a picture of a kangaroo on a unicycle – my

first ever, to be honest – and then what happened is that the whole

thing, this short conversation went viral. Shane liked the reply, he

shared it with many of his friends, they shared it with other people and

it was free publicity for Samsung on the basis of which Shane, clever

as he was, eventually got his personalised Samsung S III with his own

dragon on it.

Veronika: So, it was a win-win. The company got free publicity and he got his

freebie. Great, everybody happy.

Bernard: You see many more examples of that happening online now and we’ll

share some with you on the website as well. This is again showing

how important language is and not being afraid of being creative in an

online context when the stakes are not too high.

(Musical interlude)

Veronika: We’d now like to move our focus a bit. We’ve looked at creativity in

this exchange with customers with the Samsung example but we now

want to go back to politeness, which we mentioned in the introduction.

And I'm very happy to introduce our guest for today, Professor

Jonathan Culpeper, who is actually a colleague of mine at Lancaster

University so that’s particularly nice. Good morning, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Good morning, hello.

Veronika: Right, so Jonathan’s work, oh God, it ranges very, very widely. You

may have heard him in the media, including recently, Jonathan is very

well known for his work on the language of Shakespeare, for instance.

But that’s not why he’s here today.

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Jonathan: No, not quite.

Veronika: So, today he’s here as he’s equally well-known as an expert on

politeness and, indeed, impoliteness. So, he really came up with this

theory of impoliteness in interaction, how people speak. And he has a

book on that. But, of course, you can’t be an expert on impoliteness

without also being an expert on politeness. So, that’s why he’s here

today. Thanks for joining us.

Jonathan: Pleasure.

Veronika: We have an example to start you off. I think Bernard wants to

introduce an example about politeness in customer interaction.

Bernard: Yes, because the things that we associate with politeness and

impoliteness, you have obvious examples of things like rude

language, for instance but what I wanted to share with you is the

impact of unexpected silence. And I need to give you a bit of context

here.

This is a fairly long time ago when I was going to Spain as an

Erasmus student and all excited to go to Spain. I had learnt a bit of

Spanish before going there so you have this kind of inflated self-

confidence. And you go to the bakery and you order bread but in

Spanish. So, I said, “Una barra por favor,” You know, with the Flemish

accent, of course.

And I got my loaf of bread but nothing else, so no verbal input. Then I

paid. The only thing he said was, “Ochenta,” which is what I had to

pay. Then I paid and I said, “AquÍ tiene!” which is also, “Here you are,”

in Spanish and again, nothing. And he gave me my change and he

actually threw it on the counter and then it was, “Hasta luego,” and

that was it.

I found that really odd because I was thinking, you know, with the

cultural stereotypes, they’re all very naïve, aren’t Spanish people

supposed to be very outgoing and chatty? So, I thought, “Okay, this

guy is having a bad day.”

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And the next day, it happened again and the day after that, it

happened again. And then I…

Veronika: In different shops, though, right? Not always with the same baker?

Bernard: Different shops as well but…

Veronika: So, it wasn’t the baker who had it in for you?

Bernard: Well, at first I thought, “This is ironic. This is a baker who is not a

morning person.” It’s like a fish who doesn’t like swimming.

Jonathan: This experience is parallel to my experiences of going to Italy. I

frequently go because I'm married to an Italian and it’s exactly the

same. And so, if you walk in, you want a coffee in a coffee shop, you

would say something like, “Mi dammi un caffè.” And that’s the default

way of doing it, “Give me a coffee.”

Now, if you try that in England, it wouldn’t go down particularly well.

Veronika: Yeah, good luck.

Jonathan: When you can say, “Give me a coffee, please.” But actually, in Italy,

they wouldn’t do the please. It’s only people trying to speak Italian as

a foreign language who would go in there and add in, “per favore,” and

all the rest of it. So, that wouldn’t happen, it would be, “Mi dammi un

caffè.”

What you might get at the beginning is, possibly, “Buongiorno,” a sort

of greeting at the beginning.

The whole business of politeness is how you oil those wheels of

interaction, how you smooth social relations. And the thing is in

different cultures, it’s done in different ways. And so, in a coffee shop,

there isn’t the expectation that you’re softening up what you’re asking,

you’re softening your request in some way.

In England, the structure that is very, very common is you either say,

“Could I have a coffee?” or, “Could you give me a ...” whatever, it’s

the ‘could you/can I’ structure that’s incredibly common. But literally, if

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you think about it, that is a question about whether they’re able to do

it and so it’s an indirect way of beating around the bush kind of way of

getting what you want and it doesn’t happen in some other cultures.

As I say, what you might get is a little bit of social oiling at the

beginning with a “Buongiorno,” or something like that to oil the wheels.

So, it’s just working in a different way.

Now, for people coming from another culture, it can seem a bit off-

putting that maybe you’ve done something wrong but you haven’t, it’s

just a different system.

Veronika: I think it’s very important to remember that nobody… well, in some

situations they do but usually people are not trying to be not polite,

you know, they’re just being polite in their own ways, in their own

cultural ways, really.

Also this intercultural thing, Jonathan, is this also something you could

see, perhaps, within one and the same country?

Jonathan: You absolutely can. I’ve been doing some work on cultural variation

within England. Now, the thing about that is that people – and the

reason I'm doing it, actually – people often assume that one country

equals one culture so there’s one culture for England, there’s one

culture for France, one for Spain, etc., etc.

But actually, if we think about it, there are lots of cultures within a

country and the one that’s probably best known about in England is

our differences concerning the north and the south.

Veronika: I'm sure, Bernard, you have the same with Flanders and Wallonia in

Belgium, right?

Bernard: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Well, as you know, some people do

consider it to be two different countries.

Veronika: We’re not quite there yet with north and south England.

Bernard: No, no, not a bit.

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Jonathan: In England, I think – and I'm saying England because Britain is an

even larger unit – but in England, the stereotype is that people in the

north do politeness through a sort of friendliness style. It’s more a

matter of connecting with people, of saying, “Hello, love,” and all the

rest of it.

Veronika: That’s not “love”, Jonathan, it’s “luv.”

Jonathan: I am trying, it’s terrible when you have a… I grew up in London and

trying to do it… my daughters could do it.

But anyway, so that kind of friendliness approach to politeness is one

you might get, actually, in Italy too so the, “Buongiorno,” at the

beginning is the same kind of thing.

So, you do get this in the north and what I've been looking at is

whether the styles of politeness are different in the north and south.

And actually, one of the key things that differs is the level of formality.

You get more formality in the south compared with the north. And by

formality, I would include another way of doing politeness, which is

deference, it’s using ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ and actually, ‘sir’ and ‘madam’

in terms of its distribution, where that occurs most of all is in service

encounters, that is used a lot.

Veronika: I have an example of that because I work in the north, in Lancaster,

and live in the south west of England, in Gloucestershire, and when

you’re on trains, which is a service encounter with the person

checking your tickets, right? So, in the north, when you present your

ticket between Lancaster and Manchester, your conductor may say,

“Oh ta, luv,” which is, “Thank you, love.” But in the south, I have heard

train managers or conductors say to me, “Oh, much obliged.”

Jonathan: Yes, exactly, exactly. And this actually turned out to be generally true

that the more informal, that instead of saying, “Thank you or thanks,”

you get, “Ta.” So, the informality was stronger in the north compared

with the south.

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So, it’s not a matter of being more or less polite, it’s using different

resources/devices to achieve politeness; that’s what it’s about. And

those resources, really, you choose what suits the culture.

Erika: I really like those metaphors that you use, Jonathan, about oiling the

interaction and softening the situation. How about instances where it’s

not all about oiling the interaction but doing exactly the opposite, trying

not to be polite, even downright cheeky or rude?

Jonathan: Well, I should have another metaphor for that but I don’t. I suppose

you could take it as twisting the knife in the wound because if you

really want to be impolite, you actually select something that twists

and aggravates someone; that’s really what you’re attempting to do.

Erika: I'm asking this because I have this really good example from the work

that Veronika and I did in the book that we wrote. There are many

good examples on social media when companies sort of cross the line

between being polite and impolite but we have our favourite here from

Tesco Mobile where a customer wrote a tweet that says, “Immediate

turn-off if a girl’s mobile network is Tesco Mobile.”

So, this is the customer tweeting. And then Tesco Mobile responded to

this and they said, “Are you really in a position to be turning girls

away?”

Veronika: And that went pretty viral as well. We’ll put that on our blog, the Twitter

exchange.

Jonathan: This is actually an extraordinary riposte from Tesco because if they

are attempting to do some kind of mock impoliteness, meaning that

they are using the trappings, they’re saying something that on the

surface seems impolite but in context, they intend it as a bit of a

bantering joke or something like that, they really are risking it.

Because telling real impoliteness apart from mock impoliteness is

difficult and you need strong signals to tell the other person that you’re

only joking about it.

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If it were vocal, you would use different prosodies, you’d use

exaggeration; often elongated vowels. “Thank you sooo much,” would

be a way of being mock polite. Or if you’re being the opposite, you

would say something like, I don’t know, “You plonker,” insert real rude

word there. You would use it in the context where you’re really good

friends with the person, it’s impossible that you really meant…

Now here, with Tesco and a customer, how you read this could be

either. There aren’t clear signals that it’s mock impoliteness and

actually, you could see it almost as impoliteness. On the other hand,

we know they have no vested interest in being rude to the customer

one would think.

So, actually, it’s an extraordinary example. I would imagine that it’s not

very well delivered from their point of view, I'm not quite sure what

they’re trying to do.

Veronika: Well, I think, you know, the customers were being impolite to Tesco,

they said, “Immediate turn-off if it’s your network,” that’s impolite,

right? So, that means, “Your network is rubbish.” And then they do the

extraordinary thing in being impolite back, whether genuine or not.

Well, maybe they were really just cheesed off or maybe whoever runs

their Twitter account had a daring day or whatever it is.

But what it did, it again gave them complete free publicity, like the

example with Samsung that we discussed earlier on, you know,

because this went viral and basically, this Felipe character turned out

to be the butt of everyone’s joke.

Jonathan: Yeah, and one of the main functions of impoliteness, is entertainment.

Even some cases of genuine impoliteness, people are actually

entertained. It sounds sad but people are entertained by the

impoliteness going towards… not all cases of impoliteness because I

think some of the extreme cases are simply not amusing. But

something like this, you know, a sort of riposte to someone like this.

And it’s quite clever, in a way.

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And so, often, that tinge of cleverness is the thing that people get

amused by; it’s a good riposte if you take it as that.

Veronika: And on Twitter, of course, you have a vast audience so it becomes a

bit of a spectator sport.

Jonathan: Yes, absolutely.

Veronika: So, I think that’s really important that we have a silent third party here,

you know, in this Twitter exchange.

Jonathan: Spectator sport is exactly the sort of thing. I often think of it as a

gladiatorial show but spectator sport is exactly the right thing here and

that’s why it goes viral and so forth; it’s entertaining.

Veronika: Fascinating stuff, really. And again, I feel we’ve barely scratched the

surface on this. But we’ve talked a bit about genuine and non-genuine

politeness and impoliteness and service interactions and we’ve had a

good look at, I think, at intercultural issues when it comes to politeness

and I think that’s really important.

And next time, we’ll be looking at how customers talk back. So, we’ll

have an interview, obviously, again for that.

If you want to tune in for that, Jonathan, as well.

Jonathan: Pleasure, yes.

Veronika: Thank you so much for doing the interview with us today, that’s been

really very illuminating, thanks a lot, Jonathan.

Erika: Thank you for being here.

Jonathan: Thank you. Bye.

(Musical interlude)

Bernard: Right. So, the data analysis that we’ll do today is a bit different from

the customer service exchanges that we were talking about so

business-to-customer, if you like.

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Today, we would like to have a look at business-to-business because

that’s an aspect of communication that has not been researched that

much, let’s say, as business-to-customer interactions but,

nevertheless, also very interesting. And what we want to show you

today is an example from a customer complaint and a reply by the

company. And the company is an international company and they sell

and do maintenance of heavy machinery so forklift trucks and things

like that.

Veronika: So, what we have here is, we have an interaction between two

businesses?

Bernard: Yes.

Veronika: Okay, so we have business-to-business communication?

Bernard: This is B2B, yeah. And the language policy at the company is that they

address the customers in their mother tongues. So, I’ll read out an

email that is written in English by an L2 speaker of the language but

the customer is an L1 speaker of English.

Veronika: Which is to say that English is the mother tongue of the customer but

the person who replies, their mother tongue is in this case Dutch.

Bernard: Exactly, exactly. So, I’ll just read it out and then I’ll comment on the

letter together with you, Veronika and Erika. So, here we go:

“Good afternoon,” and then you get the first name. “In December, we

have received two master cylinders back from you. They were

returned to us under warranty. A technician has now checked and

tested these two cylinders and I'm afraid I have to inform you that the

warranty claims have been rejected.

On both of the units, he has found that the cups are swollen and or

damaged. He is convinced that this is not because of a faulty

component, he says that this damage can be caused by the use of the

wrong or polluted oil or the use of solvents, for instance cleaning

products.

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Because of the damage to the cups, the cylinders start leaking and the

pressure reduces. I'm afraid this cannot be considered as valid

warranty conditions and, therefore, we will not be able to issue a credit

for the two parts. If you want to, we can return both units with a future

shipment?

Below, you can find a few pictures and all the necessary information

on the parts. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to

contact me. Best regards,” and then the first name again.

So, the situation here is that these people, they know each other. This

is not a one-off event, as you often have in business-to-customer

communication; they know each other. And yet, you have this kind of

rejection of this claim. So, we have an interesting balance between the

transactional on the one hand, and the interpersonal on the other

hand.

Now, what is different from business-to-customer, perhaps, and I'm not

sure whether you would agree with me or not, Erika and Veronika, but

in business-to-customer, you would expect more of an apology, right,

more empathy, “I'm sorry that this happened to you. We apologise for

the inconvenience,” and things like that. You don’t get that here. It’s

mainly transactional.

Veronika: It’s mainly transactional but they do some sort of interpersonal stuff

and they also do some politeness, right? So, you said they know each

other and you can see they’re all on first name terms so that seems an

established relationship. And well, they have to do something face

threatening, this business customer wants a credit under warranty and

they have to reject that demand, right?

And they have to work a bit on that. They don’t, perhaps, so much as

you would for an individual customer but they do things like, “I'm afraid

I have to inform you,” right? So, this is a bit of a mitigation so there’s

an apology there with, “I'm afraid,” and then it’s, “I have to.” So, it’s

constructing as, “I don’t want to do that myself but I have to, I'm under

some sort of external obligation to do that.”

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And then you also have where they really talk about why they have to

reject this demand for credit under warranty. They use a lot of what

linguists would call agentless passives so passive voice where

nobody’s doing anything. So, they say things like, “This is cannot be

considered a valid condition.”

Erika: We don’t know who is doing the considering, right?

Veronika: Exactly, exactly. And again, they say, “We will not be able to issue a

credit.” It’s not like we don’t want to do that we’re technically not able.

And then also, you read out the question mark, Bernard. So, they say,

“If you want to, you can return both units with a future shipment,” they

do regular business – that’s actually a statement – but they add a

question mark and that’s a bit of involving the person they’re

addressing so, “You need to answer do you want us to do that or not?”

So, they do a little bit of politeness and a little bit of apology, you know,

but maybe not as much as you would expect in an interaction with an

individual customer.

Bernard: That’s it. But basically, they’re also blaming the customer but again,

they’re using these passive constructions. They’re saying, “This

damage can be caused by the use of wrong or polluted oil.”

Veronika: That’s right, not like, “You mistreated the product, it’s your fault,” but,

“It can be caused…” it doesn’t say who does that.

Bernard: Exactly.

Veronika: Although it’s obvious from the context it would be the customer but

they don’t put the customer on the spot.

Bernard: We also had interviews with these people, the sales reps and they told

us that, “You know, many customers just give it a try. They’ve messed

with our products; they know that they’ve messed with our products.

They send it back to see whether we’ll give them warranty or not. And

that’s why we can also keep it strictly technical you know? They gave

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it a try, we noticed, the technical department saw that it had been

tampered with and that’s it.”

Veronika: Yes, there’s a lot of context knowledge when nobody says it but

everybody knows, “Customers will try it on and we just provide the

evidence and the pictures and the technical explanation because we

all know what’s really going on, it’s the customer trying it.”

Bernard: What was also interesting is that we were actually expected to give

consultancy to the company. So, they asked us, “Are we doing a good

job in replying to our customers in this way?” And to be honest, we

didn’t know what the answer was because we have this kind of

framework of, you know, being very polite indeed, using an apology,

showing empathy. And this is not what they did.

So, we carried out an experiment with their customers and we added

all of that, apologies, thank you messages, empathy messages and

guess what, in terms of customer satisfaction and repurchasing

intentions and loyalty, nothing changed! Nothing.

Veronika: So, in this context, you don’t actually need to do more than they

actually do?

Bernard: Yep, that’s it.

Erika: Actually, there is another study that was published in 2010 that proves

exactly the same thing. Researchers manipulated an apology letter

and they added more and more strategies of politeness and what they

found was the same as what you found, Bernard, the first one, giving

reasons is the crucial one. That’s when customers are happy because

they know what’s happening. But all the other additional ones like

complimenting the customers or expressing sympathy, not only did

they not affect perception at all, some of them actually made it worse

because they made the letters harder to read and less logical.

Veronika: That’s interesting, really, you know. So, giving reasons is really the

one thing that makes or breaks it. And yes, you need some politeness

but you can have too much of a good thing, it seems.

21


Erika: Yes.

Veronika: I mean, it would be really interesting to see how the customer in this

case responded to this rejection.

We don’t have time to go into that now but our next episode will be all

about customers talking back. So today, it was talking to customers,

next time it will be about customers talking back. Do join us for that

and stay in touch in the meantime, if you like.

Erika: Okay, bye.

Bernard: Bye, bye, thank you.

(Closing credits)

END OF AUDIO

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