The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets - (Bloomsbury Discourse) by Ursula Lutzky (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets studies the discursive and pragmatic features of customer service interactions, making use of a corpus of over 1.5 million tweets from more than thirty different companies. With Twitter being used as a professional service channel by many transport operators, this book features an empirical analysis of British and Irish train companies and airlines that provide updates and travel assistance on the platform, often on a 24/7 basis.

From managing crises in the midst of strike action to ensuring passengers feel comfortable on board, Twitter allows transport operators to communicate with their customers in real time. Analysing patterns of language use as well as platform specific features for their communicative functions, Ursula Lutzky enhances our understanding of customers' linguistic expectations on Twitter and of what makes for successful or unsuccessful interaction. Of interest to anyone researching discourse analysis, business communication and social media, this book's findings pave the way for practical applications in customer service.

Review Quotes

The Discourse of Customer Service Tweetsoffers an insightful and cutting-edge examination of contemporary digital business discourse. Focusing on a large corpus of travel industry communication on Twitter, Lutzky provides readers with a meticulously designed study and rigorous analysis, written in style that is highly engaging and lucid.
Camilla Vásquez, Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of South Florida, USA

A lucid and penetrating analysis of Twitter as a crucial part of customer service discourse, and an outstanding example of how a corpus-based investigation can provide fascinating new insights into the intricacies of customer service interactions via tweets.
Andreas H. Jucker, Professor of English Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

About the Author

Ursula Lutzky is Associate Professor of English Business Communication at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.