Business communication: conversation analysis and investigation of sales personnel-customer spoken discourse

The aim of this paper is to carry out a discourse analysis between sales personnel and customers in order to describe and explain how language is actually used in such a business context. The paper examines the organization of the business interaction between sales personnel and customers. The paper specifically examines turn-taking, adjacency pairs and topic organization using conversational analysis approach. Conversation analysis is the term used in linguistics to refer to a method of studying the sequential structure and coherence of institutional talk such as sales personnel-customer interaction. The study shows how both the sales personnel and customer structure and make their business talk coherent and intelligible leading to effective business communication. Though the conversations are quick and evanescent, they are more organized and structured. For this reason, both the sales personnel and customers should lay stress on rules and functions of spoken discourse as they carry out business transactions.