Unpacking the Art of Customer Complaint Handling in Spanish and British Telecom Emails: A Cross-Cultural Webcare Study With a Human Touch

In spite of the rise of new media in a B2C context, companies still prefer to handle complaints privately. As such, many complaints are handled via email resulting in a professional communication genre of its own. In this study we performed a cross-cultural genre analysis to understand the specific discourse structure of the moves within response mails to complaints, on the one hand, and the importance of the communicative function of Conversational Human Voice within this genre, on the other. With this aim, we collected authentic organizational email replies to complaints from telecom companies active in the UK and Spain (36 and 44 emails respectively). The results indicate that the British and Spanish data sets show a similar discourse structure in terms of move frequency. The submoves that are prototypical for all data sets are Greeting, Explanation, Conclusion, and the closing submoves Sign-off and Signature. The data sets differ mainly in their frequency for the interpersonal submoves Empathy, Gratitude, and Apology, which are more prevalent in the English corpus, and the more business-oriented moves, such as Contact reason, Marketing, and Future contact, which are mainly present in the Spanish corpus. This suggests that organizational email replies to complaints are a rather conventionalized genre, with some linguacultures putting more effort in company-customer interactions by using more interpersonal submoves. Regarding the cross-cultural analysis of the expression of Conversational Human Voice we observed an influence of the respective linguacultures in the sense that the Spanish data are less personal and less invitational than the English mails, although they present more empathetic intensifiers. Furthermore, both data sets show only a limited extent of informal language. We evaluate these findings in the light of previous work.