“Bravo pour votre incompétence!” Exploring the French-Speaking Customer Service Interactions of Three European Train Operating Companies Online

Today, customer service interactions take place in the digital sphere to a considerable extent. In fact, several social networking platforms have been reappropriated to this end, allowing businesses to engage in conversations with their customers. In this study, we investigate the nature of these conversations on Twitter (now X) in three different French-speaking countries. We focus on the national train operating companies in France (SNCF), Belgium (SNCB) and Switzerland (CFF) and study their Twitter interactions with customers in French, using a corpus linguistic methodology. Our study is based on a corpus of more than half a million tweets addressed to and posted by the respective companies between 2018 and 2022. The aim of this contrastive study is to highlight the linguistic features and communicative strategies used by the respective companies and their customers, with a view to uncovering potential features pertaining to the discourse of customer service tweets in French.