Ebook: The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets: Planes, Trains and Automated Text Analysis

Investigating digital business discourse on Twitter, 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 40 different companies, Ursula Lutzky discusses the use of the microblogging site by businesses for purposes of customer communication.
With Twitter being adopted as a professional service channel by many transport operators, this book features an empirical analysis of train companies and airlines making use of the platform to provide updates and travel assistance, often on a 24/7 basis. From managing conflicts in the midst of strike action to coordinating the delivery of toilet roll to an unfortunate train passenger, Twitter allows transport operators to communicate with their customers in real time, for better or for worse. Analysing patterns of language use as well as platform specific features, such as hashtags, for their communicative functions, this book 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, The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets also provides practical applications for customer service development.