A Pragmatic Study Of Comforting Strategies In The Airline Complaint Responses

With the continuous improvement of social requirements for the work quality of airline customer service staff,it is of great research significance to use comforting strategies that are appropriate for polite communication to deal with customer complaints.This thesis studies the use of comforting strategies in complaint responses by customer service staff of a civil airline.Comforting helps alleviate or resolve negative emotions(Burleson 1985,Burleson and Goldsmith 1998).Given the fact that the ways that customer service staff respond to complaints can affect consumer satisfaction,loyalty,and the company’s reputation,the comforting strategies employed by customer service staff in response to customers’ negative emotions caused by complaints deserve our attention.The term “comforting strategy” in this study is defined as: a strategy which is implemented when a comforted person has negative emotions due to a negative event,and a comforter tries to turn his or her negative emotions into positive ones.This study uses Speech Act Theory(Searle 1979)and Leech’s Politeness Principles in 1983 as the theoretical support,selects airline customer service staff’s complaint responses as data,and addresses two research questions:1)What comforting strategies are employed in airline complaint responses? 2)What are the functions of comforting strategies in airline complaint responses?Based on a corpus of 38 telephone recordings(approximately 7 hours)provided by the complaint center of a civil airline,this thesis adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,and divides comforting strategies into two kinds,that is,emotion-centered comforting strategy and problem-centered comforting strategy.And then four types of emotion-centered strategies are found:apologizing,expressing sympathy and support,sharing similar experience,andaffirming the ability or effort of the customer;three types of problem-centered comforting strategies: analyzing the problem and explaining the reason,offering advice and help,providing compensation and follow-up help.Then,by summarizing the frequency of each strategy,this study finds that problem-centered comforting strategies are used more than emotion-centered comforting strategies.Finally,combining with three maxims of Leech’s Politeness Principles,that is,tact maxim,sympathy maxim,and agreement maxim,and selecting appropriate examples in the data for analysis,this study finds that these comforting strategies perform three functions: providing advice,expressing sympathy,and showing agreement.The significance of this study lies in that positive comforting strategies can play a role in appeasing customers,improving customers’ satisfaction and loyalty,restoring the company’s reputation,and enhancing its competitiveness;negative comforting strategies can also alert the airline to improve service quality of customer service staff.