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In:Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, spoken, written
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Iris Hübscher and Lucien Brown
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 333] 2023
► pp. 297–325

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Chapter 11
Customer support agents in Spanish live chats

Affective communication and multimodal politeness

ORCiD logo with link | Universitat de València
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.11iya
Abstract
Little research has been addressed to multimodal politeness in professional-layperson interactions such as between agents and customers in online platforms such as live chats. Customer support plays a significant role in commercial firms and institutions given two functions: achieving successful interactions with customers to maintain their loyalty and, the public image of the company. Thus, this ethnographic study focuses on the effects of live-chat customer support agents including or omitting affective communicative cues such as emoticons, among others, as multimodal politeness strategies in interactions with customers. The illustrative examples here show that when live-chat agents use non-verbal affective communicative markers, interactions become more personal. This improves the level of service satisfaction in customers and the public image of the company.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Politeness and multimodality in digital discourse
    • 2.2Emoticons, other non-verbal modes and emotions
    • 2.3Online professional-layperson communication
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Research data
    • 3.2Approach
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Communication style type with low affective content
    • 4.2Communication style type with medium affective content
    • 4.3Communication style with high affective content
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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