“So What Are You, a Telephone?”: Emotion Management in Complaint Responses in BELF Phone Interactions

Responding to customer complaints is a delicate issue, as customers are likely to hold negative emotions while complaining. This becomes even more challenging when English is used as a business lingua franca (BELF) by Chinese employees working at the complaint center to respond to English-speaking customers in voice-to-voice phone interactions. Positioned within intercultural pragmatics, this chapter draws data from 38 recordings of telephone interactions made between customers and employees of a complaint call center of one Chinese airline, lasting about seven hours in total. A discursive approach is adopted to address the research question: how do customer service agents of complaint centers manage customers’ negative emotions in complaint responses? Data analysis reveals that the agents’ priorities and decisions in emotion management are not only goal-driven, but also highly institutionalized. By employing such strategies as shifting cognitive focus, altering attention, neutralizing strong emotion, and showing sympathy, they demonstrate commitment to their institutional roles. Faced with linguistic, sociocultural, and institutional constraints, the agents are professionally institutionalized and interpersonally de-individualized, which can sometimes make them sound like a machine. This study concludes that there is a tendency of over-institutionalization in BELF phone interactions. The findings shed light on intercultural pragmatics and emotion management practices in business institutions.