Chapter 11. Customer support agents in Spanish live chats

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.