Introduction

Abstract

The relationship between service providers and customers in service encounters is quite a delicate matter. The success of the business may depend on such relationships and the care taken of the customers. This study aims at investigating service encounters on the telephone in English, German and Italian from a conversation analysis (CA) perspective. Since the beginnings of CA, telephone calls have been widely researched. At the beginning, studies aimed at discovering regularities and patterns in this distinct type of conversation, above all in its opening and closing sequences. One strand of this research has tried to find common and different patterns among different languages through cross-cultural studies. Less attention has been paid to the development of these exchanges after the openings. This is the object of this book. Previous studies focused on the construction of such relationships between service providers and customers in face-to-face encounters, as in the work of the Pixi project in which English and Italian bookshop encounters were compared (Aston, 1988a; Zorzi, 1990; Brodine, 1991), and the interactions between the employees of a reprographic store’s drop-off counter and their customers by Vinkhuyzen and Szymanski (2005), in which non-granting requests were analysed. The way speakers deal with the business on the phone has only recently been explored by Lee (2011a), in her analysis of a distinctive type of telephone conversation, i.e. that made to an airline service in South Korea.