“Helping you to pay us”: Rapport management in debt collection call centre encounters

Leigh Harrington

doi:10.1515/pr-2018-0013

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates the rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2005) that collections agents at a UK-based utilities company call centre are expected to perform during debt collection telephone interactions. It examines the rapport-relevant information communicated in the textual materials, including training manuals, through which a prescribed debt collection style is implemented. The analysis reveals that there are tensions in the rapport-concerns that collectors must attend to when using the style. Collectors are instructed to perform potentially face-threatening behaviours in order to collect debt, whilst simultaneously engaging in linguistic behaviour that may be interpreted as face-enhancing and which functions to develop rapport with the debtor. It is suggested that the local deployment of this contradictory “helping you to pay us” philosophy is problematic on multiple levels and may give rise to relational tensions between collectors and debtors who have conflicting expectations about rapport management entitlements. In turn, this may contribute to a culture of sanctioned face-attacks in call centres (Archer and Jagodziński 2015). Therefore, I suggest that call centres may need to loosen the synecdochical hold they have over their employees, thereby affording them the flexibility and volition to cope with the complex face demands, unpredictability and potential volatility of debt collection encounters.

Highlights

As the prototypical example of a research site where the “language work” of employees constitutes the service work itself, it is unsurprising that the contemporary call centre ( CC) has been a prolific subject of study for linguistic research (Cameron 2000a: 328)
Re-contacting Electrik and explaining my interest in researching how debt collectors speak to customers, I was permitted to return to the site as a researcher to conduct an observation day during which I listened to calls, conducted semi-structured interviews with collectors, and acquired copies of the three main tools through which corporate linguistic styling was exercised: a training manual called “How to collect debt” (HTCD, 31 pages), a call quality guide (CQG, 4 pages), and a set of call-scoring criteria for collections calls (CSC, 4 pages)
The analytical approach used illustrates how the synthesis of rapport management theory with sociolinguistic conceptions of style may be productively used in pragmatic investigations of prescriptive linguistic styling in call centres

Summary

Introduction

As the prototypical example of a research site where the “language work” of employees constitutes the service work itself, it is unsurprising that the contemporary call centre ( CC) has been a prolific subject of study for linguistic research (Cameron 2000a: 328). Whether “inbound” (caller initiated) or “outbound” (CC initiated), CC interactions take place between a CC agent (a public servant) and a customer (a private citizen) (Hood and Forey 2008: 400) Such extra-organizational contexts are characterized by an asymmetrical power dynamic between these interlocutors. Grandey et al (2004: 399), for instance, observe that the popular mantra “the customer is always right” illustrates an agent’s absolute “obligation to show deference to the customer” as a private citizen (Callahan 2006: 31) This power asymmetry goes some way to accounting for why the socio-discoursal role of a public servant can significantly limit the linguistic resources at their disposal. The extent to which a public servant is formally “restricted by certain institutional codes of conduct” is heightened in CCs because of the lengths these organizations go to to control their agents’ linguistic work, including scripting, styling and call-scoring assessments where quality analysts remotely listen to calls to evaluate an agent’s performance (Limberg 2009: 1389)

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