Abstract

This article examines the role of interpersonal closeness building in the customer service’s responses to complaints in telephone interactions from a discourse analysis approach. Based on five extracts drawn from the data of about two hours of 15 recordings of telephone interactions between customers and the customer service of one Chinese airline, it reveals that the customer service mainly employs six types of strategies as ways of building interpersonal closeness: alignment, compliment, affiliation, solidarity, self-disclosure, and empathy. The use of these strategies, very often a combination of several strategies at the same time, is intended to create closeness in behavioral, affective, and cognitive dimensions, facilitating complaint settlement. The findings enhance our understanding of the role of interpersonal relationship in complaint responses in customer service.

Keywords: interpersonal closeness, complaint responses, phone interactions, customer service