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

Ursula Lutzky, Nicolas Ruytenbeek

Publication: Scientific journalJournal articlepeer-review

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-30
Number of pages30
JournalContrastive Pragmatics
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - Dec 2024

Austrian Classification of Fields of Science and Technology (ÖFOS)

  • 508015 Business communication
  • 602007 Applied linguistics
  • 602058 Corpus linguistics
  • 602042 Romance studies

Keywords

  • customer service
  • social media
  • Twitter
  • corpus linguistics
  • business communication

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