Some Interactional Practices Related to Long Telephone Service Calls

• In Event: 348 - Regular Session. The Management of Interactional Challenges in the Workplace

Abstract

Call centers are institutionalized work places designed to enable optimal customer care: efficient resolution to a wide range of caller’s requests. These service calls are collaboratively achieved such that handle times, customer satisfaction and even the resolution to the caller’s problem are dependent upon the turn-by-turn talk-in-interaction of the participants. In this paper, we consider difficulties that arise in service calls that extend the length of the interaction. Using conversation analytic methods, a corpus of more than three hundred calls from three different call center contexts are analyzed: calls to a state healthcare payer, calls to a mobile telecommunication provider, and calls to an international financial organization. We discuss several interrelated practices that result in long call handle times due to caller non-adherence and disparities between the agent and caller’s knowledge. For example, callers who do not fully disclose the reason for their call at the outset and instead make additional requests mid-call are utilizing a call creep practice that deviates from the canonical service call contour. Organizational limits to the number of requests that callers can make allow agents to invoke these limits or rules in order to realign callers to the prescribed call structure. Finally, we examine how information flow from the expert agent to novice callers can be a source of trouble that lengthens the service call.

Authors

• Margaret Szymanski, Xerox Innovation Group

• Michaele Smith, California State University-East Bay