研 究 生 毕 业 论 文
（申请硕士学位）
论文题目
商务交际中顾客投诉回应策略的实证研究
作者姓名
学科、专业名称
姜琳丽
外国语言学及应用语言学
研究方向
语用学
指导教师
陈新仁 教授
2011 年 5 月 11 日
学
号：
论文答辩日期：
指 导 教 师：
年
月
日
（签字）
An Empirical Study of Customer-Complaint
Response Strategies Used in Business
Communication
by
Jiang Linli
Under the Supervision of
Professor Chen Xinren
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Arts
English Department
School of Foreign Studies
Nanjing University
2011
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my
knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another
person or material which has to a substantial extent been accepted for the award of any
other degree or diploma at any university or other institute of higher learning, except
where due acknowledgment has been made in the text.
Signature:
Name:
Date:
____Jiang Linli _
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis is accomplished under the inspiration and enlightenment of my respected
supervisor, Professor Chen Xinren. He provided me with a lot of constructive advice and
insightful suggestions from the very beginning of my MA thesis writing. He patiently
read and carefully proofread many drafts of my paper. Moreover, he encouraged me a lot
when I was in depression during the long process of thesis writing.
I am very grateful to Professor Ting Yanren, Associate Prof. Wang Wenyu, Zhou
Dandan, and Dr. Snow for their teaching in the past years. Their instruction benefited me
a lot.
I should express my appreciation to all the participants in this study. Without their
help there would be no way that I could obtain the data of this study.
Many thanks should go to my classmates in the thesis writing class and my
colleagues, who came up with many helpful ideas for my thesis and gave me many
suggestions on how to deal with the questionnaire.
I also owe my special thanks to my family, who have always been supporting me to
pursue my graduate study and my thesis writing. Without their encouragement and
support, the completion of the present paper would have been impossible.
Jiang Linli
南京大学研究生毕业论文中文摘要首页用纸
毕业论文题目：
商务交际中顾客投诉回应策略的实证研究
外国语言学及应用语言学 专业
指导教师（姓名、职称）
：
2008 级 硕士生 姓名： 姜琳丽
陈新仁 教授
摘要
本文采用实证手段，从语用学视角探讨了商务交际中对顾客投诉进行回应的策
略。基于Brown 和 Levinson (1978)的“面子理论”及前人对日常交际中的抱怨投
诉及其回应言语行为的研究，本文旨在研究中国客户服务从业人员在用英语对顾客
投诉进行回应时所选择的回应类型，同时对回应过程中礼貌策略和内部修饰语的使
用情况进行研究，并分析回应类型的选择与顾客抱怨严厉程度之间的联系。
为了找到相关语境，并且选择典型、有效、具有代表性的语料进行分析，本文
以某跨国电子企业真实情境下的顾客投诉记录为基础进行先期研究。在先期研究过
程中，作者从投诉原因、顾客不满程度及投诉严厉程度等方面对40个顾客投诉真实
情景进行定量分析，最终选出典型的样本和情景，设计出一份针对该企业的包含八
个顾客投诉情景的语篇补全测试（DCT）问卷。从该企业选出的20名客服人员认真填
写了该问卷。
本文数据分析的结果如下：首先，在商务交际中，被投诉者接受顾客投诉的比
例大于日常交际，但让步性回应及否定或拒绝投诉的回应依然存在。这一结果表明，
在商务交际中，为了保全顾客的面子并维持顾客对公司的满意度，避免产生正面冲
突或流失顾客，商业企业多采取慎重的态度回应顾客投诉，尽可能认可顾客的看法
并满足顾客的要求。但出于自身经济利益的考虑，商业企业仍会作出拒绝及否定的
回应。其次，在回应过程中，客服人员选择不同的礼貌策略，包括积极礼貌策略和
消极礼貌策略，来提升顾客的积极面子或减轻对顾客面子的损害。同时，为加强回
应的礼貌程度以减轻投诉的负面效应，被投诉者会选择使用一些内部修饰语，比如
主观化处理、模糊语、第一人称复数化，以及使用一些致歉的语言形式等。第三，
数据显示商务交际中，顾客投诉的严厉程度会影响客服人员对不同回应类型的选择。
研究发现顾客投诉严厉程度越高，说明顾客对公司的不满越强烈，为缓解顾客的不
满情绪，避免流失商业机会，被投诉者给予有利的答复的可能性越高；而针对严厉
程度较低的投诉，被投诉者通常出于商业利益的考虑而拒绝顾客的要求。
通过对商务交际中顾客投诉回应策略的研究，本文在理论研究和实践方面均有
所贡献。理论上，本文对顾客投诉回应类型的分类以及对各类回应中不同策略和内
部修饰语的分析对言语行为及面子理论的研究作出了一定的贡献，并将言语行为理
论研究的触角延伸到商务交际领域。在应用上，本文提出的回应策略及其英语表达
方式对客服人员及企事业单位进行顾客投诉管理具有一定的指导作用。此外，本研
究对商务英语学习者及教师也具有现实指导意义。
关键词：商务交际 顾客投诉 回应策略 礼貌
南京大学研究生毕业论文英文摘要首页用纸
THESIS: An Empirical Study of Customer-Complaint Response Strategies
Used in Business Communication
SPECIALIZATION:
POSTGRADUATE:
MENTOR:
Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Jiang Linli
Professor Chen Xinren
ABSTRACT
This paper reports an empirical study of the response strategies employed by
customer service staff to handle customer complaints in business English communication
from the pragmatic perspective. Inspired by the existing studies on complaint and
complaint response in daily conversation, the present study aims at investigating what
types of responses are provided to customer complaints in English by Chinese customer
service staff and revealing the politeness strategies deployed by complainees when
responding to customer complaints, specifically, the internal modification used by the
complainees to mitigate the impact of the responses as FTAs. Moreover, it tries to reveal
how the response types and strategies relate to the severity levels of customer-complaints.
In order to choose relevant contexts and select appropriate materials to develop the
instrument for the main investigation, a preliminary study was carried out to gather the
common customer complaints against an electronic company based in Shenzhen and
choose some typical samples and scenarios. Based on the preliminary study, a DCT
questionnaire was used to explore the types and strategies of responses to these
complaints. A total of 160 customer-complaint responses made by 20 subjects of the
study were examined.
The data analysis in this study generated the following findings. First, in business
communication, favorable responses are used more frequently than concessive responses
and unfavorable responses. It is indicated that the complainee chooses to accept the
customers’ complaints frequently or make concessive responses much more than refusing
the customers in order to maintain a close relationship with customers and avoid a true
verbal confrontation. Second, different politeness strategies are used in different types of
complaint responses to enhance the customers’ positive face or mitigate the impact of
FTA. Specifically, certain types of internal modifiers have been used to play down the
impact of the undesirable events and ill consequences in order to make the response
sound more polite. Last but not least, Chinese customer service staff vary their response
types and strategies according to the severity levels of customer complaints. It is found
that when responding to severe complaints, complainee prefers to accept the complaint in
order to maintain a relatively peaceful climate and defuse the potentially explosive force
of the complaints to save the customers’ face. On the opposite part, when responding to
mild complaints, complainee tends to choose unfavorable reactions.
The present study has implications in many ways. Theoretically, the categorization of
complaint response types together with the suggested strategies and internal
pragma-linguistic modifications for each type of response makes contributions to speech
act studies and extends the speech act study to the field of business communication.
Practically, the present study provides tips for customer complaint handling to Chinese
customer service staff or some companies and organizations. The study is also helpful for
those who are engaged in Business English teaching and learning.
Key words: business communication; customer complaint; response strategy; politeness
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. 2
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... ii
摘要 ................................................................................................................................... iv
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES ............................................................................. viii
LIST OF ABBREVIATION............................................................................................ ix
Chapter One INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 1
1.1 Object of the Study .................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Significance of the Study........................................................................................... 1
1.3 Structure of the Thesis ............................................................................................... 2
Chapter two
LITERATURE REVIEW ....................................................................... 3
2.1 Definition and Characterization of Complaints and Complaint-responses ............... 3
2.1.1 Defining complaint and complaint response ....................................................... 3
2.1.2 Defining complaint as an FTA ............................................................................ 4
2.1.3 Classifications of complaints .............................................................................. 5
2.1.4 Characterization of complaint-responses ............................................................ 6
2.2 Characterization and Severity level of Customer Complaints................................... 7
2.2.1 Definition and characterization of customer complaints..................................... 7
2.2.2 Severity level of customer complaints ................................................................ 9
2.3 Previous studies on Handling Customer Complaints .............................................. 11
2.4 Summary.................................................................................................................. 12
Chapter Three
METHODOLOGY ............................................................................ 14
3.1 Research Questions.................................................................................................. 14
3.2 Subjects .................................................................................................................... 14
3.3 Research instruments ............................................................................................... 16
3.3.1 A preliminary study ........................................................................................... 16
3.3.2 Questionnaire .................................................................................................... 19
3.4 Data Analysis ........................................................................................................... 20
3.4.1 Types of response to customer complaints ....................................................... 20
3.4.2 Strategies of responses to customer complaints ................................................ 21
3.4.3 Relationship between response types/strategies and the severity level of
customers’ complaints ................................................................................................ 27
Chapter Four RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ......................................................... 29
4.1 Types of Responses to Customer complaints .......................................................... 29
4.2 Strategies of Responses to Customer complaints .................................................... 30
4.2.1. Strategies in favorable responses ..................................................................... 30
4.2.2. Strategies in unfavorable responses ................................................................. 32
4.2.3. Strategies in concessive responses ................................................................... 34
4. 2.4 Internal Modification........................................................................................ 35
4.3 Relationships between Types/Strategies and the Severity Levels of Customer
Complaints ..................................................................................................................... 36
Chapter Five CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 40
5. 1 Major Findings ....................................................................................................... 40
5.2 Implications of this Study ........................................................................................ 42
5.3 Limitations of the study ........................................................................................... 43
5.4 Recommendations for Future Research ................................................................... 43
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 44
APPENDIX: QUESTIONNAIRE.................................................................................. 48
LISTS OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 2.1 Description for categories of reason/expectation of customer complaints .. 8
Table 2.2 Description of the severity levels of customer complaints .......................... 9
Table 2.3 Description of intensity levels of customers’ dissatisfaction ..................... 10
Table 3.1 Subjects’ personal data ............................................................................... 15
Table 3.2 Assessment of the intensity levels of dissatisfaction ................................. 17
Table 3.3 Assessment of the reasons/expectations of customer complaints .............. 17
Table 3.4 Severity level of customer complaints ....................................................... 18
Table 3.5 Characteristics of each item in DCT questionnaire.................................... 19
Table 3.6 Distribution of severity level of complaint in DCT questionnaire ............. 27
Table 4.1 Distribution of types of responses to customer complaints in this study ... 29
Table 4.2 Frequency of politeness strategies being used in favorable responses ...... 31
Table 4.3 Frequency of politeness strategies being used in unfavorable responses .. 33
Table 4.4 Frequency of politeness strategies being used in concessive responses .... 34
Table 4.5 Frequency of internal modification used by complainee ........................... 36
Table 4.6 Distribution of types of responses to customer complaints ....................... 37
Table 4.7 Distribution of types of responses to complaints according to the severity
level of customer complaints...................................................................................... 38
Fig. 3.1 Distribution of intensity of dissatisfaction, complaints reasons/expectations,
and severity levels of complaints in DCT questionnaire............................................ 20
LIST OF ABBREVIATION
1.
ESP
English for specific purpose
2.
DCT
Discourse Completion Task
3.
FTA
Face-threatening act
4.
FR
Favorable response
5.
UR
Unfavorable response
6.
Cat.
category
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Object of the Study
With the development of speech act theory, great interest has been directed to the
study of specific speech acts across cultures. Compared to requests, compliments and
refusals, the speech act of complaining is, however, less touched upon. In addition,
complaint-responses from complainee have emerged as a new subject of pragmatic study
in recent years. Some scholars are devoted to uncovering the strategies of responding to
complaints in daily conversation (Boxer, 1993; Laforest, 2002; Liu, 2004; Newell &
Stutman, 1990). But in today’s businesses, customer dissatisfaction and complaints used
in business communications are also unavoidable. It is clear that managing and handling
complaints quickly and effectively is the key factor in earning back the loyalty and
patronage of the customers. Yet little research exists on the study of strategies of
responses to customer complaints from the pragmatic perspective.
The present study is undertaken to research the strategies of customer-complaint
responses in business English communication from the pragmatic perspective, based on
Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory. It aims to investigate what types of responses are
provided to customer complaints in English by Chinese customer service staff and
revealing the politeness strategies and the internal modifications deployed by complainee
when responding to customer complaints. Moreover, it discusses how the types of
response are affected by the severity levels of customer complaints.
1.2 Significance of the Study
As an attempt to reveal the politeness strategies deployed by company staff in
responding to customer complaints, the present study is assumed to be significant in the
following respects:
1
Theoretically, the study would enrich the Speech Act Theory by constructing an
analytical framework of complaint-response, and extend the speech acts study into the
field of business communication. Since its advent in the early 1960s, Speech Act Theory
has aroused the widest interest. And progress in research on the application of the theory
in the field of English for Specific Purpose (ESP), has also been substantial. This study
will provide further evidence for the widely recognized argument that the performance of
speech acts is sensitive to a variety of contextual factors, particularly in business
communication.
Practically, it is hoped that the results of this study would contribute to organizations
or companies some valuable information on handling customer complaints by developing
a standard guideline for professional trouble-shooting. Organizations have realized the
importance of customer complaints in the business life. The way of dealing with
complaints may affect the overall level of customer satisfaction and long-term customer
loyalty. It is hoped that customer-service units, in particular front-line staff, could gain
some suggestions about how to respond to customer complaints, especially foreign
customer complaints from the present study.
Furthermore, the present study may generate some pedagogic implications. The
results of the study may prove beneficial for business English teachers or the business
trainers to develop the business English training course and develop better teaching
materials to address this problem area.
1.3 Structure of the Thesis
The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One mainly introduces what this study is
about and why it is undertaken. Chapter Two characterizes customer complaints and their
responses, and reviews related existing studies. Chapter Three describes the methodology
adopted in the present study, including the research questions, identification of the
subjects, selection of instruments, data collection and data analysis. Chapter Four reports
the results of the study for each of the research questions and discusses the major findings.
Chapter Five is the conclusion part, summarizing the whole study, pointing out the
existent limitations, and making suggestions for further studies.
2
Chapter two
LITERATURE REVIEW
As the gateway to our understanding of complaints and complaint-responses
strategies, previous studies will be introduced in this chapter. At the beginning, various
definitions and characterization of complaints and complaint-responses are going to be
introduced. Besides, the existing studies on complaints and customer complaints are to be
presented. Furthermore, the related few and limited studies on handling customer
complaints are reviewed.
2.1 Definition and Characterization of Complaints and
Complaint-responses
2.1.1 Defining complaint and complaint response
Based on Austin’s (1962) and Searle’s (1969, 1979) Speech Act Theory and their
classifications, many researchers have explored the actual forms and functions of
different speech acts in different languages. As for complaint, Trosborg (1995) defines it
as “an illocutionary act in which the speaker (the complainer) expresses his/her
disapproval and negative feeling towards the state of affairs described in the proposition
and for which he/she holds the hearer (the complainee) responsible, either directly or
indirectly” (1995, p. 311). According to Searle’s (1976) typology, complaint belongs to
the category of expressive speech acts, expressing the speaker’s approval as well as
disapproval of the behavior which the complainee has already done or failed to do.
Moreover, when a complaint is issued, a directive act may be implied or added (Trosborg,
1995, p. 320). Trosborg (1995) suggests that this involves an attempt to make the
complainee repair the damage he/she caused, and/or an attempt to prevent a repetition of
the deplorable act. So when the speaker complains, rather than just expressing his/her
3
moral censure or blame, he/she is tending to request the hearer to perform a remedial act
to compensate for the loss of the speaker. Therefore, the speech act complaint involves
both expressive function and directive function.
2.1.2 Defining complaint as an FTA
The concept of a face threatening act (FTA) derives from Politeness Theory, as first
proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978), and extensively developed since then. Brown
and Levinson define “face” as “the public self-image that every member (of a society)
wants to claim for himself” (1987, p. 61). They recognize that everyone has similar face
wants and they distinguish between two aspects of face– positive face and negative face.
While positive face concerns the hearer’s desire to be appreciated and approved of by
selected others, negative face “represents the basic claim to territories, personal preserves,
rights to non-distraction” (Brown & Levinson, 1987, p. 61). Everyone has both negative
face and positive face, and both of these aspects of face are, at times, threatened by
another (Brown & Levinson, 1978). When an act of verbal or non-verbal communication
“run (s) contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/or the speaker”, this is called a
“face-threatening act” (FTA) (Brown & Levinson, 1978, p. 70).
In the speech act of complaining, the speaker (S) “expresses displeasure or
annoyance” (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993, p.108), and “disappointment or grievance”
(Clyne, 1994, p. 49), in response to an action that is seen by the speaker as unfavorable. It
is “an expression of dissatisfaction addressed by an individual A to an individual B
concerning behaviors that A feels on the part of B is unsatisfactory” (Laforest, 2002, p.
1596). Clearly, complaining is an intrinsically face-threatening act (FTA) (Murphy &
Neu, 1996; Sauer, 2000; Olshtain & Weinbach, 1987). It threatens the hearer’s positive
face because of the speaker’s damage to his/her self-image, or the speaker’s accusation
and anger on the hearer’s previous wrongdoing; in addition, it also threatens the hearer’s
negative face because the complaint has an implicature of requesting some compensation
from the hearer. The conflictive nature of complaining might result in a breach of the
social goal of maintaining comity and harmony between speaker and hearer (Leech,
1983).
4
2.1.3 Classifications of complaints
In order to reveal the strategies of responding to customer complaints, it is necessary
to find out the characteristics and categories of complaints first.
According to Boxer (1989), two categories of complaint can be distinguished in
terms of their patterns and functions: direct complaints and indirect complaints. In the
first category, i.e., direct complaints, the addressee is held responsible for the perceived
offence and is expected to acknowledge or change the undesirable state of affairs (Boxer,
1993). Direct complaints display the situations that hearers express their displeasure or
annoyance immediately and face to face when they are perceived by the speaker as
affecting him unfavorably. A direct complaint involves an explicit or implicit accusation
and at least one explicit or implicit directive (Clyne, 1994, p.54). By stating or implying
that the addressee is responsible for a perceived offence, direct complaints threaten the
addressee’s positive face, i.e. the need to be approved of and liked. Moreover, by stating
or implying that the addressee should undertake some action to change the undesirable
state of affairs, the complaint impinges on the addressee’s negative face, or their need to
be unimpeded and autonomous (Daly & Holmes & Newton & Stubbe, 2003 ).
An indirect complaint is defined as a long or repeated expression of discontent not
necessarily intended to change or improve the unsatisfactory situation (Clyne, 1994). It
differs from a direct complaint in that the addressee is neither held responsible nor
capable of remedying the perceived offense. Data from a large study on indirect
complaint among native speakers showed that indirect complaints are frequently
employed as positive strategies for the purpose of establishing points of commonality
(Boxer, 1993). They function to provide emotional release, or to off-load negative effect,
rather than provoke actions to redress the offense. In other words, indirect complaints are
not prototypical FTAs; rather, they are typical ways of establishing rapport with others.
In business communication, customers are likely to complain directly in order to
express their dissatisfaction and redress the offense. Therefore, the present study focuses
on direct complaint.
5
2.1.4 Characterization of complaint-responses
As mentioned in 2.1.2, the FTA of complaint threatens both hearers’ positive and
negative face, and the hearer is also involved in the situation where he/she should do
something to compensate for the loss of the speaker, which would be considered as a
complaint response. While the act of complaining, like several other FTAs, has been dealt
with in a few studies, the response to complaining has been considered far less often
(Laforest, 2002, p. 1605).
If we take the complaint as the first part of an adjacency pair, there is no typical
corresponding second part from an interactional standpoint (Laforest, 2002). “In Austin’s
terms, the ‘perlocutionary intent’ of a complaint is negotiable - a hearer cannot be said to
recognize by convention what behavior will satisfy the complaint” (Edmondson, 1981, p.
280). According to Laforest (2002), the complaints can be followed by, apart from
acceptance, denial, rejection, justification, making excuse, etc. Laforest (2002) has
classified complaint-response realization patterns into four large categories:
(1) acceptance of the complaint,
Him: You are damned wasteful!
Her: Ah I was going to put it away. I’m sorry. (apologetically)
(2) partial acceptance (‘yes but’ response)
Her: Now you’ve got egg yolk in your hair! (clearly disapprovingly)
Him: (laughs) Do you promise me not to tell your sister about it? (She is an only
child)
Laforest (2002) explained that “in this example, the response to the complaint does
not testify to a refusal of responsibility for the act, but humor is used to make fun of it
to a certain extent, so that there is not too much loss of face by the speaker.”
(3) rejection of the complaint
Him: You ate all of them! (containers of yogurt)
Her: No! I ate the big one. There is still some left.
(4) disregarding the complaint
Her: Hey! Are you through spitting on me?
Him: (3-s pause)
6
Guffey (2003) categorizes complaint-responses in terms of the approaches of
conveying responses into two types: direct approach and indirect approach. According to
him, a direct response is normally used to state the good news. It begins with the main
idea or best news, followed by relevant explanatory details and ends with an appropriate,
friendly paragraph; an indirect response is used for conveying bad news messages,
including refusing a replacement or refund, declining requests or favors, and conveying
other negative news. Guffey (2003) suggests that the bad news must be conveyed
carefully since the reader or the listener would be irritated, angered, or disappointed with
bad news messages.
The scholars mentioned above have contributed much to the study of complaint
responses, and laid a solid foundation for further studies on this subject. However, they
all focus on pragmatic strategies of complaint-responses in daily conversations, without
any consideration of English for Specific purpose, especially for Business English. Thus,
it is necessary to encourage more researchers to explore the use of complaint response
strategies in Business Communication.
2.2 Characterization and Severity level of Customer
Complaints
2.2.1 Definition and characterization of customer complaints
With the development of business communication, people who participate in
business activities lodge complaints more frequently and continually than ever. When
customers are dissatisfied with the service provided or the quality of goods, they tend to
air their feelings in order to regain emotional balance or in order to get things done
properly. So they express their frustration and disappointment to the complainee. These
complaints are called customer complaints. According to Barnes (1988), customer
complaints are seen as essential expressions of dissatisfaction by those who feel as
purchasers of services or goods. Complaining happens because the purchasers fail to get
their expectation satisfied. Stated by Archer and Ames (1971), most complaints from
customers are made for one of the following three reasons: 1) faulty goods, 2) poor
7
services, and 3) overcharges. There are other reasons, such as disagreement with
company policy, but they are in the minority (1971, p. 163).
According to Cunliffe and Johnson (2008), there are 5 categories of facts which may
cause the customer complaints: no action, repeat, product quality, speed, and reprimand.
It is generalized and described in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Description for categories of reasons/expectations of customer complaints
Reasons/ expectations
No action
Description
Lack of action by company representatives: expect complaint
will result in action
Repeat
Customer subject to a number of experiences that have not met
their expectations: expect complaint will result in expectations
being met (in terms of better service etc.)
Product quality
Customer believes they have been given bad products: expect
complaint will result in change or compensation
Speed
Customer believes response to his/her request is tardy: expect
complaint will result in speedier action
Reprimand
Customer believes an employee has acted inappropriately:
expect complaint will result in reprimand
There are two ways for customers to express their complaints in business
communication. The first is the written form which is usually used in the form of fax,
e-mail, or complaint letters. It can also be found in printing media, such as newspapers
and magazines. The second is the spoken form, which can be found in a face-to-face
situation, such as in big organizations, in banks, or in trading activities. It can also be
done through telephone, which is more popular due to its convenience and effectiveness.
In the present study, emphasis is to be placed on customer complaints, which is
8
defined as the expression of unhappiness, annoyance, or disapproval for the
dissatisfaction of products or services voiced by external consumers toward the addressee
who is held responsible for the undesirable products or services.
2.2.2 Severity level of customer complaints
As mentioned in 2.2.1, in business communication, when customers feel they are
poorly treated, they easily become impatient, and tend to convey their dissatisfaction and
anger by complaining. According to Olshtain and Weinbach (1987), customers developed
complaints in different levels of severity ranging from below the level of reproach to
immediate threat. It is presented in Table 2.2.
Table 2.2 Description of the severity levels of customer complaints
Severity levels of complaints
Below the level of Reproach
Description
Customer avoids explicit mention of the offensive event
or direct focus on it. Customers choose to minimize face
threatening and cost of complainee.
Expression of Annoyance or
Customer tries to avoid open confrontation with
Disapproval
company, but makes it clear that there is a violation of
some sort.
Explicit complaints
Customer has made decision to use an open
face-threatening act towards the company, but to
instigate no sanctions.
Accusation and warning
Customer performs an open face-threatening act and
even implies that he/she would take sanctions.
Immediate Threat
Customer chooses to openly attack complainee by taking
the form of an ultimatum with immediate consequences.
According to Cunliffe and Johnston (2008), the severity level of complaint was
affected by the customers’ intensity degree of dissatisfaction and their expectation.
9
The intensity of dissatisfaction can be scaled into six levels, satisfied, slightly
dissatisfied, annoyed, very annoyed, extremely annoyed, and absolutely furious (see
Table 2.3).
Table 2.3 Description of intensity levels of customers’ dissatisfaction
Intensity of
Description
Illustration
dissatisfaction
Slightly
Customer intimates that he/she is not yet
slight concern
dissatisfied
satisfied and/or suggests that minimal
not yet received satisfactory
action will return them to a satisfied state
explanation
Customer expresses their displeasure or
express displeasure
incredulity
feel disappointed
Annoyed
annoying and frustrating
Very annoyed
Customer expresses their displeasure or
total dissatisfaction
incredulity in a superlative form
extremely disillusioned
suggesting the company will have no
Will not recommend to
further recommendation from them
friends/family
Extremely
Customer expresses their concern or
disgusted
annoyed
desperation. Making it clear that they
at the end of my tether
will personally execute no further
extremely annoyed
business with the company and also
dissuade others from doing
dissuade others
business with the company
Absolutely
Customer appears incensed and/or
absolutely disgusted, enraged,
furious
exhibits threatening behaviour.
threatening to complain to
Customers remove their business
other industry bodies etc.
removal of customers business
10
2.3 Previous studies on Handling Customer Complaints
Face Theory suggests that a face-bearing rational agent will tend to utilize the
FTA-minimizing strategies according to a rational assessment of the face risk to
participants (Brown & Levinson, 1987). In the case of complaining, the speaker does not
want to go so far as to damage the relationship between the speaker and hearer. He/She
would take into account the tact maxim and provide the potential victim with a number of
loopholes or excuses to avoid or at least mitigate the aversion to take the blame (Trosborg,
1995). However, in business communication, situations are different. When customers
feel they are poorly treated, they easily become impatient and demanding, tend to
complain directly in order to show their annoyance and anger, even demand or threaten
emotionally instead of requests for action rationally (Barlow & Mollwe, 2008). Therefore,
it is difficult for companies or organizations to handle customer complaints properly and
effectively.
These studies show that researchers and organizations have realized the importance
of customer complaints in the business life. The way of dealing with complaints may
affect the overall level of customer satisfaction and long-term customer loyalty. Thus,
academic research has attempted to investigate the procedures or strategies for companies
or organizations handling consumer complaints.
Many researchers have devoted to the study of the complaint management process
and give some suggestions of complaint management and service recovery process
(Cunliffe & Johnston, 2008; Guffey, 2003). Cunliffe & Johnston (2008) review some key
ingredients to the complaint management process, e.g. acknowledgement, empathy,
apology, own the problem, fix the problem, provide assurance, and provide
compensation. Guffey (2003) discusses adaptation – the process of creating a message
that suits the audience. According to him, the important features of adaptation techniques
include receiver benefits, “you” view, and positive wording. He also suggests that careful
communicators should consider the difference between what is called a direct and an
indirect approach when organizing their messages.
In addition, many case studies have been done on the strategies of customer
complaints handling in some specific area or for particular personnel to reveal the general
11
strategy or the role of different positions of the organization or company in managing
customer complaints. Rimkiri (2006) investigates how the middle management of
Panasonic in Thailand handles the customer complaint. Cunliffe and Johnston (2008)
conduct a study on complaint management and the role of the chief executive for a
leading financial service company in the UK.
These studies have revealed some important methods, procedures, channels, and
guidelines in handling customer complaints. However, they all focus on the process of
managing and handling customer complaints. Little has been studied on the key factor to
any complaint handling – communication strategy, especially from the pragma-linguistic
perspective. Therefore, further study need to be done pragmatically on the use of
strategies in performing the speech act of responding to consumer complaints.
2.4 Summary
In summary, previous studies have contributed much to the study of complaint and
complaint response. Firstly, they have enabled us to understand the nature of
face-threatening speech act of complaints and politeness strategies employed in
responding to complaints. Secondly, efforts done in the field of complaints and their
responses in daily conversation have provided some suggestions about understanding the
response strategies in business communication. However, little has been done to study the
politeness strategies of responding to consumer complaints from a pragmatic perspective.
The present study is such an attempt at reporting the speech act behavior of customer
complaint response. It will be different from the previous studies in the following ways:
1) It focuses on the pragma-lingustic strategies in responding to customer complaints,
unlike previous studies that focus on complaint management and handling from the
management perspective. The study reported here attempts to approach Chinese customer
service staff’s speech act performance of complaint-response, focusing on what
politeness strategies they choose in the given scenarios. It presents a systematic
description of customer complaints, and establishes a more systematic set of the
strategies of complaint-response from the pragmatic perspective.
2) The instrument in this study is based on a preliminary study of a random sample
of 40 customer complaints in the company, differing from most early studies depended
12
on situations imagined by analysts in advance. The scenarios in Discourse Completion
Task questionnaire in the present study, therefore, are more credible because they are
close to the natural situations of customer complaints.
3) Unlike most studies on subjects of English learners, the present study investigates
Chinese Customer Service staff in their real business communication. The front-line
staffs of customer service are more capable for dealing with customer complaints and are
able to respond the DCT questionnaire by referring to their working experiences. Thus,
the data can be used for further studies on Chinese speech acts of complaints and
complaints-responses, especially for the comparative studies.
4) The present study investigates situations in business context, differing from the
previous studies focusing on conversations in daily life. The responses obtained in the
study are more close to the real situation in business. Therefore, it is more helpful for
business participators or Business English teachers to learn the pragmatic strategies of
responding to customer complaints used in business communication.
13
Chapter Three
METHODOLOGY
This chapter deals with the methodology used in this study. It consists of five
sections. Section One raises the research questions to be addressed in this study. Section
Two provides the background information of the subjects involved. Section Three
describes the methods of data collecting, including the preliminary study and the research
instrument description. Section Four introduces the way the data were analyzed.
3.1 Research Questions
The present study is an attempt to describe the strategies of responding to customer
complaints employed by Chinese customer service staff. The main research questions
addressed are as follows:
1) What types of responses do Chinese customer service staff provide to customer
complaints?
2) What strategies do Chinese customer service staff employ when responding to
customer complaints? Specifically, what internal modification do they use to mitigate the
impact of the responses as FTAs?
3) How do their response types and strategies vary with the severity levels of
customer complaints?
3.2 Subjects
In the present study, the investigator chose to research electronic manufacturers in
China
whose
customer
relationship
departments
might
face
hundreds
of
customer-complaints each day, via letter, e-mail, or telephone. Dealing with customer
complaints is one of the most important jobs for them. Since most electronic firms are
joint ventures or foreign-owned companies, English is used as a tool for both external and
14
internal communication. Furthermore, there are specified and documented processes for
dealing with complaints in these companies. Thus, it is easy to find, track and sample
customer complaints and to reveal how to respond to consumer complaints.
The investigator approached a joint venture firm of mobile phone manufacturer in
Shenzhen. Like many joint ventures of electronic company, it provided many kinds of
on-the-job training of communication courses, especially those related to effective
customer complaint handling - making customers satisfied with the immediate and right
solution to the problem. The company agreed to provide access to its recorded complaints
through its call center and also access to its customer relationship department which was
responsible for dealing with complaints.
The specifically selected subjects for the present study were 20 Chinese staff of
customer relationship department in the company. They were chosen as the subjects
because they are good at communicating in English and dealing with customer
complaints in English was one of their responsibilities of their daily routine.
The personal data of the subjects were presented in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Subjects’ personal data
Personal data
Frequency
No. of cases
Gender
Age
Male
5
Female
15
20-25
5
26-30
5
31-35
6
36-40
4
Educational
Below Bachelor’s Degree
3
background
Bachelor’s Degree
12
Master’s Degree or higher
5
Working
1-2 years
6
experience
3-5 years
5
15
Use of English
6-7 years
3
8-10 years
4
More than 10 years
2
Very often (every work day)
1
Often (3-4 days a week)
13
Sometimes (1-2 days a week)
6
3.3 Research instruments
3.3.1 A preliminary study
In order to choose relevant context and select appropriate material to develop the
instrument for the main investigation, a preliminary study was conducted to explore the
common customer complaints against this company and choose some typical samples and
scenarios for the discourse completion task.
First of all, 40 customer-complaints of this company for its products, after-sale
services, even environment of the care centers were collected. These complaints were
made by customers through telephone at the Call Center and were recorded in the
company’s Customer Relationship Management System. 14 of complaints were made by
foreign customers (including Hong Kong customers) in English, but others were in
Chinese. Then, after translating the Chinese version into English, the investigator
analyzed the complaints and chose the typical effective complaints as the scenarios of
DCT. To find the proper and effective complaints, the criteria of effective complaint by
Hatch (1983) were used. According to Hatch, there is one part of complaint that must
exist in the effective complaint event, which is called the act statement, the statement of
the problem, in which the complainer complains the problem or the things that make him
or her unhappy or dissatisfied toward the addressee or addressee’s action.
Frequencies and percentages were used to analyze the 40 complaint events in terms
of intensity of dissatisfaction, reason/expectation of complaints, and severity level of the
complaints. To ensure the consistency of these three factors, broad guidelines were
16
developed to aid consistency in the allocation of the intensity of dissatisfaction, the
reason/expectation of complaint, and the severity level of the complaint, upon the
reference of Cunliffe and Johnston’ study (2008) and Olshtain and Weinbach’ study
(1987).
The initial estimation for each complaint in the preliminary study reveals the
percentage of each level of intensity of dissatisfaction of customers. The results from the
samples are shown in Table 3.2.
Table 3.2 Assessment of the intensity levels of dissatisfaction
Slightly
Annoyed
Dissatisfied
Very
Extremely
Absolutely
annoyed
annoyed
furious
%
25.0
42.5
25.0
5.0
2.5
n
10
17
10
2
1
The table shows that 92.5% of the population for customer complaints lay between
slightly dissatisfaction and very annoyed, and a few people would be extremely or
absolutely angry (totally 7.5%). According to Johnston (1998), the reason might be that
the more dissatisfied customers are likely to take greater actions, including moving to a
competitor and dissuading other customers not to use the company’s products and service,
rather than making a call to complain. Thus the intensity of dissatisfaction of complaint
scenarios in the DCT is clustered closer to the average level.
The assessment of the complaints also reveals five broad types of complaints express
either as reasons why the complaints are being made and/or an expectations of the
outcome. However, for those cases in which there are multiple reasons for the complaint,
the primary reason is recorded. The reason or expectation for complaining is shown in
Table 3.3.
Table 3.3 Assessment of the reasons/expectations of customer complaints
No action
Repeat
Product quality
Speed
Reprimand
n
6
14
9
8
3
%
15.0
35.0
22.5
20.0
7.5
17
It is found that more than 1/3 of customers complain when they have experienced
repeat problems, which suggests that not dealing well with previous issues is the largest
source of complaints. In the second and third place are complaints against product quality
and speed, 22.5% and 20% respectively. It is followed by customers who believe that
they have not received a response (i.e. there has been no action) from customer care
centers (14% respectively). Lastly, 7.5% of the customers complain because an employee
has acted inappropriately and they expect that the complaint would result in reprimand.
By breaking down each complaint and identifying the components of each of them,
the investigator found the allocation of levels of severity of the customer complaints.
There are several complaint sentences in each complaint event which are in different
levels of severity, so the most severe one is chosen as the sample in this part. The result is
shown in Table 3.4.
Table 3.4 Severity level of customer complaints
Below the level
Expression of
Explicit
Accusation
Immediate
of Reproach
Annoyance or
complaints
and warning
Threat
40.0
18.0
4.0
Disapproval
%
9.0
29.0
The table reveals that nearly half of the consumers (40%) just make explicit
complaint rationally rather than warning or threatening. Some customers (29%) choose to
express their annoyance or disapproval. 18 % of the complaints accuse or warn to the
customer service staff. For example, I will never think of buying a xx set and have ever
started advising the same to all. Even 4% of the customers threaten the customer service
staff by saying words like “Otherwise, I will move to the consumer courts. This is the last
call in the matter”. To the other end, 9 % of the samples are below the level of reproach.
In order to investigate the complex strategies of handling and responding customer
complaints comprehensively, the DCT questionnaire should cover all, or at least most of
the types of complaints. After categorizing the samples, the scenarios for the DCT were
fixed.
18
3.3.2 Questionnaire
The instruments of this study consisted of a questionnaire designed in accordance
with the purposes of the study.
The questionnaire consists of two parts. Part 1 is for demographic data, in which
subjects were asked to provide basic information, including gender, age, education,
working experience, and use of English at work.
The second part is the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which was based on the
results of the Preliminary study. After investigating the samples carefully, the
investigator selected 8 typical and effective complaint events and formed a DCT
questionnaire (see Appendix).
The characteristics of each item in DCT are shown in Table 3.5.
Table 3.5 Characteristics of each item in DCT questionnaire
Intensity of complaints
Reasons/expectations
Severity levels
1
④ Extremely annoyed
② Repeat
④Accusation and warning
2
① Slightly dissatisfied
③ Product quality
② Expression of Annoyance or
Disapproval
3
②Annoyed
④ Speed
③ Explicit complaint
4
③ Very annoyed
② Repeat
③ Explicit complaint
5
③ Very annoyed
⑤ Reprimand
③ Explicit complaint
6
① Slightly dissatisfied
③ Product quality
① Below the level of Reproach
7
②Annoyed
① No action
② Expression of Annoyance or
Disapproval
8
⑤Absolutely furious
② Repeat
⑤ Immediate threat
From the table we can see that the DCT questionnaire in the present study is covering
all levels of complaint events. The distribution of intensity of dissatisfaction, complaints
reasons/expectations, and severity levels of the complaints in the DCT questionnaire of
this study is shown in Fig. 3.1.
19
Fig. 3.1 Distribution of intensity of dissatisfaction, complaints reasons/expectations,
and severity levels of complaints in DCT questionnaire
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
A
B
1
2
3
C
4
5
3.4 Data Analysis
The data of the study is analyzed as follows:
3.4.1 Types of response to customer complaints
Complaint response is a major part of complaint management. Although there are
several ways of responding to a complaint (see Laforest, 2002; Newell & Stutman,
1989/1990), those ways can be said to fall into two broad categories: acceptance and
rejection. But there are a certain number of responses paraphrased as ‘yes, but …’, which
“consists in conceding (frequently implicitly) that the complaint is well founded, but only
in part” (Laforest, 2002, p. 1605). Such responses, in which the complainee accepts the
responsibility for the act he/she is being blamed for but refuses the complainer’s request
or claim, was regarded as pure rejections of the complaint by Newell and Stutman
(1989/1990), while Laforest (2002) brought them “into the domain of acceptance” (2002,
p. 1605). In this study, responses which consist of a partial acceptance and a refusal are
20
categorized as concessive response independently.
In everyday conversation, there is another complaint response – disregarding the
complaint (Laforest, 2002). With this pattern, the complainee ignores the complaint by
“remaining silent or uttering something that has nothing to do with the subject” (Laforest
2002, p. 1605). According to Laforest (2002), it could be interpreted as an admission of
‘guilt’ or as a complete rejection of the complaint. However, since in business
communication, the complainee (customer service staff) is responsible for handling the
customer’s complaint promptly and should show the empathy as well as honesty to
maintain the relationship with its customers (Barnes, 1998), purely and simply ignoring
the customer’s complaint is not allowed. Thus, this category is not involved in this study.
In response to the Research Question 1, “what types of response do Chinese
customer service staff provide to consumer complaint”, responses to consumer-complaint
in the present study, were classified into three categories: favorable responses,
unfavorable responses, and concessive responses based on the Face Theory.
Favorable responses are used for accepting customer’s complaints and granting
his/her requests (good news messages).
Unfavorable responses are for rejecting customer’s complaints and refusing his/her
requests (bad news messages).
Concessive responses consist in partially accepting the customer’s complaint and
refusing his/her request.
All the responses to the 8 scenarios made by subjects in this study were grouped in
terms of the three types, and analyzed by percentage to reveal the distribution of the three
types of complaint response in business communication.
3.4.2 Strategies of responses to customer complaints
Any communication has a risk to face (Brown & Levinson, 1987), especially in
business communication. For the complainee, the customer service staff, it might be a
risk of threatening his/her own face and threatening the customers’ face at the same time.
So they have to carefully protect faces for themselves, and more importantly, to respect
the face of the customer to maintain the communication. Therefore, a number of
strategies are available to the complainees to mitigate the impact of the undesirable event
21
and the ill consequences, avoid a direct confrontation and build up a harmonious
environment with their customers, so as to avoid loosing customers.
In response to Research Question 2, “what strategies do Chinese customer service
staff employ when responding to customer complaints”, the investigator characterized the
response strategies in terms of positive politeness and negative politeness (Brown &
Levinson, 1987).
These strategies are defined and/or illustrated below with examples from the
responses of the DTC questionnaire in the present study.
3.4.2.1 Strategies of positive-politeness
According to Brown and Levinson (1987), “positive-politeness techniques are usable
not only for FTA redress, but in general as a kind of social accelerator, where the speaker,
in using them, indicates that he wants to ‘come closer’ to the hearer” (p. 103). The
potential face threat of an act is minimized in this case by the assurance that in general
the speaker wants at least some of the hearer’s wants.
Strategy 1 Indicating appreciation or compliment
Complainee usually praises the outcome and benefits of the customers to ease the
customers’ expectation and boost the customers’ positive face. Some examples are given
in the following:
(1)Thank you for your patronage…
(2)Thank you for your understanding and waiting.
(3)Thank you for keeping using our product…
(4)I know you are a considerate person!
Strategy 2 Admitting the responsibilities
Using this response strategy, complainee admits that they should bear the whole or
part responsibilities. By threatening their own faces, the complainee is trying to show
their willingness of taking notice of aspects of the customers’ condition and save the
customers’ faces. For example,
(5) We know this troubled you so much and this is our fault.
22
(6)Due to our negligence, …
Strategy 3 Expressing concern or understanding
To mitigate the customers’ anger and dissatisfactory, the complainee attends to show
the understanding, and give some suggestions or offer some ongoing effort. Here are
some examples from the responses of DCT questionnaire.
(7)We understand that you expect high quality from all products you purchase from xx.
(8)I know this troubled you so much, …
Strategy 4 Approving the customer’s claim and offering compensation
If the complainee accepts the customer’s complaints and requests, he/she use this
strategy to enhance the effect of satisfying the customers’ positive face want by
informing of the solution and the good news directly.
(9)I am delighted to inform we can refund your phone.
(10)We can repair it for you and please take a rotation unit to use until the repair is
done.
Strategy 5 Increasing consolidation of solidarity
This strategy is used to bridge the gap reflecting the psychological distance between
the complainees and customers and raise the customers’ social statues in order to show
the respects and establish rapports with customers. For example,
(11)As our loyal customer, I hope you could understand.
(12)We hope you would keep using our product.
(13)Please contact us any time you need help of your phone.
3.4.2.2 Strategies of negative-politeness
According to Brown and Levinson (1987), negative politeness is the most elaborate
and the most conventionalized set of linguistic strategies for FTA redress in western
culture. It performs the function of minimizing the particular imposition that the FTA
unavoidably effects. The realization of negative-politeness strategies consist in
assurances that the speaker recognizes and respects the addressee’s negative-face wants
23
and will not interfere with the addressee’s freedom of action.
Strategy 6 Be conventionally indirect to convey refusals
When the complainee has to reject the customer’s complaint or refuse the customer’s
claim, him/her uses this strategy to convey the FTA of refusal carefully in order to ease
the conflict and soften the customer’s anger. As suggested by Brown and Levinson
(1987): the more effort a speaker expends in face-preserving work, the more he will be
seen as trying to satisfy H’s face wants. So the complainee rejects the customers
indirectly by providing a weighted desirability reasoning to persuade the customers to
believe that they knew the customers’ expectation, but the problem was caused by
something beyond their control.
(14) Let me explain that the delay of repairing service was due to a long-time
discussion of this problem by our engineers, because this is the newest model recently
launched into the market.
(15)The damage was not due to the problem of our quality, so I am sorry.
(16) Sorry to tell you that your phone is not under warranty.
Strategy 7 Apologizing
By expressing regret or apologizing, the complainee indicates his reluctance to
impinge on customers’ negative face and thereby partially redress that impingement. The
apology serves as a softener of mitigating the impact of previous offence to the customer.
For example,
(17) We are really sorry for this problem.
(18)I would like to apologize for the inconvenience.
(19)We have to say sorry for our service failure and any convenience.
Strategy 8 Redress other wants of customers
This negative-politeness strategy consists in offering partial compensation for the
face threat in the FTA by redressing some particular other wants of customers. For
example:
24
(20)We have a new model launched this month, and it is an updated version, would you
like to have a try?
(21)I will ask our after-sale service staff to contact you about the replacement.
(22)I will phone you back immediately when the repair is complete.
In this section, each response was divided into three components, namely opener,
body part, and closing, in order to show the different position of each strategy used in the
response. All the strategies were analyzed by frequency and percentage of each part of
the response in order to find the most commonly used strategies by Chinese customer
service staff and the sequence of the response strategies.
3.4.2.3 Internal modification
Trosborg (1995) states that complaints may be strengthened or softened by the
inclusion of internal modifiers to as “modality markers”. The present study reveals that
there are also some internal modifiers used by complainees which serves to mitigate the
impact the unhappy events are likely to have on the customers or enhance the customers’
positive want in order to bridge the gap between complainees and customers. Five main
categories of internal modifiers are distinguished and presented below with examples
from the responses of the DCT questionnaire:
Category 1 Subjectivizers
Complainee tends to use the device to characterize the proposition as his/her personal
opinion, indicate his/her attitude towards the proposition, or show his/her sympathy to the
customers, e.g. I think, I suppose, I’m afraid. For example:
(24) I’m afraid that we are not able to help you fix your phone because this model is
not available here.
(25) I think our service centre would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused
by our product, …
Category 2 Hedges
This modification device is used to avoid a precise propositional specification, e.g.
kind of, sort of, somehow. For example:
25
(26) I’m going to contact our QC department and give you some kind of
compensation.
Category 3 Expressions of apology
As mentioned in section 3.4.2, apologizing is the main strategy of complaint
response. But in this category, the apology expressions are not used to apologizing, but
serve as language patterns of informative acts or refusal. For example:
(27) Sorry to tell you that we can’t fix your phone because our technicians need
special training.
(28) I regret to inform you that we cannot support you due to the fact that we did not
import this model.
Category 4 Pluralization of “I” pronoun
Some subjects use “we” in stead of “I” to give respect to customers and indicate that
the response or the promise is made not by himself/herself, but by the whole company to
confirm the guarantee. For example:
(29) We’d like to check whether we could refund you a new set or not. If your set is
under the warranty condition, we could claim you a new set.
Category 5 Be optimistic
The good-news expressions are used in this category to strengthen the impact of acts
of acceptance and the favorable responses to enhance the customers’ positive face and
consolidate the relationships with customers. The expressions include “we’re pleased
to…” “I’m happy to tell you that…” “We are willing to …” “Fortunately…”
Here are some examples in the present study:
(30) …we are pleased to tell you that the spare is in stock now, so we can fix your
phone at the moment.
(31) I’m happy to tell you that your claim is accepted.
26
By analyzing the responses made by subjects in this study, the investigator grouped
the major categories of internal modifiers in responses to customers’ complaints to reveal
the frequency of the use of the internal modification.
3.4.3 Relationship between response types/strategies and the severity level of
customers’ complaints
In response to Research Question 3, “how do their response types and strategies vary
with the severity levels of customer complaints”, the severity of each complaint in the
DCT questionnaire was reconsidered based on the preliminary study. Olshtain and
Weinbach’s five-point “severity of the complaint” scale (1993, p. 110) gave a solid
foundation of this study. The distribution of the severity level of the complaints in DTC
questionnaire was shown in Table 3.6.
Table 3.6 Distribution of severity level of complaint in DCT questionnaire
Severity level of complaint
Scenario number
① Below the level of Reproach
Distribution (%)
6
9.0
2, 7
29.0
3, 4, 5
40.0
④ Accusation and warning
1
18.0
⑤ Immediate threat
8
4.0
② Expression of Annoyance or Disapproval
③ Explicit complaint
Then, the investigator considered the possible “mitigation or intensification” of each
complaint based on the criteria in Laforest’s (2002, p.1609) study. Accordingly,
complaints (scenario1, 8) of the severity level of “Accusation and warning”, and
“Immediate threat” were considered as severe complaints; complaints (scenario 3, 4, 5) of
the severity level of “Explicit complaint” were less severe complaints; the remaining
complaints (scenario 6, 2, 7) with the severity level of “Below the level of Reproach” and
“Expression of Annoyance or Disapproval” were regarded as gentle complaints.
27
The investigator conducted a correlational analysis to reveal any possible relation
between the choice of responding types/strategies and the severity level of customer
complaints.
28
Chapter Four
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this chapter, the results of the current study are presented. It comprises four
sections. The first section reports what types of responses the subjects provide to
customer complaints. The second section stated the strategies which the subjects employ
when responding to customer complaints. The third section presents the major categories
of internal modification used by complainee. The last section discusses the relationship
between the response types and the severity level of customer complaints.
4.1 Types of Responses to Customer complaints
The total 160 responses obtained from the DCT are grouped in terms of favorable
responses, unfavorable responses, and concessive responses. The distribution of the three
types of responses is presented in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Distribution of types of responses to customer complaints in this study
(n=160)
n ( %)
Favorable responses
Concessive responses
Unfavorable responses
(FR)
(CR)
(UR)
64 (40.0)
51 (31.9)
45 (28.1)
Table 4.1 shows that nearly half of the responses (40.0%) were favorable; 28.1%
were unfavorable responses; and for 31.9% of the responses, the subjects had concessive
opinions.
Although it is not always easy to draw comparisons between studies, it can be said
that the results revealed great differences from Laforest’s study (2002) of the situation in
everyday conversation. Laforest’s (2002) study reveals that in 40% of the cases, the
29
complainees most often reject the blame leveled at them. The responses of acceptance are
even less frequent (9%) than responses of disregarding the complaints (13%). And
responses of partial acceptance occur about as often as responses of rejection (38%).
According to Laforest (2002), their reaction patterns are linked in part to the intimacy of
the relationship between the interactants, because they are uttered without the special
precautions generally associated with FTAs outside the private sphere.
In business communication, like in the present study, the situation is totally different.
Although the customers complain directly without any consideration of the complainee’ s
face want, the complainee makes efforts to react to the complaints carefully and
rationally in order to maintain a close relationship with customers and avoid a true verbal
confrontation. Thus, they choose to accept the customers’ complaints frequently or make
concessive responses much more frequently than refusing the customers. However, the
customer service staff also make some unfavorable and concessive responses in order to
safeguard the interests of the company and to maximize financial benefits.
4.2 Strategies of Responses to Customer complaints
According to Brown and Levinson (1987), in the context of the mutual vulnerability
of face, any rational agent will seek to avoid these face-threatening, or will employ
certain strategies to minimize the threat. In the current study, strategies are available to a
complainee who wants to redress the customers’ wants and avoid a direct confrontation
with the customers.
By analyzing the data of each type of responses to customer complaints, it is found
that the subjects choose different strategies when responding to customer complaints
favorably, unfavorably, or making a concessive response. The results are presented
respectively below.
4.2.1. Strategies in favorable responses
Among the 64 responses obtained from the DCT, the researcher divided each
response into three components- namely opener, body part, and closing- in order to show
the different position of each strategy used in the response, and chose the effective
30
components of each complaint response as the research materials. All the strategies were
analyzed by frequency and percentage of each part of the response in order to find the
most commonly used strategies by Chinese customer service staff and the sequence of the
response strategies. The result of the frequency of strategies used in favorable responses
is shown in Table 4.2.
Table 4.2 Frequency of politeness strategies being used in favorable responses
(n=64)
Strategies of Positive-politeness
Strategies of Negative
(55.8%)
politeness (44.2%)
Strategies
S. 1
Opening
32.8
82.8
(21)
(53)
Body part
Closing
S. 2
S. 3
S. 4
S. 5
S. 6
S. 7
S. 8
57.8
81.2/18.8
71.9
(37)
(52/12)
(46)
68.7
14.1
62.5
(44)
(9)
(40)
Total %
20.7
11.8
20.4
2.9
29.6
14.6
(314)
(65)
(37)
(64)
(9)
(93)
(46)
The table shows that in favorable responses, both positive politeness strategies and
negative politeness strategies are used to avoid confrontation to customers. And
positive-politeness strategies are used more frequently than negative-politeness strategies.
As for each strategy, Strategy 7 is used the most frequently, and followed by Strategy 1
and strategy 4.
In the opening part, among the 64 favorable responses, more than 80% (82.8%)
involve Strategy 7. That means most of subjects apologize at the beginning part of their
responses. Strategy 1 is also used by subjects in the opening part. The percentage is
32.8%, which indicates that subjects also tend to express compliment or appreciation in
order to boost the complainers’ positive face and satisfy the customers. It is interesting
that there are 5 responses (account for 7.8% of the total amount) without an opener.
31
Instead, the subjects approve the customer’s claim immediately at the beginning of the
conversation. In the body part, it is found that when making the favorable responses,
strategy 4 is used by all subjects, but they use it differently. Strategy 4 is used in a direct
way in more than 80% of the responses. The subjects express the good-news directly
which followed by an explanation or even without an explanation of reason; 18.8% of the
subjects use the strategy indirectly by making the explanation before giving the solution.
In addition, many subjects (71.9%) use strategy 8 to describe their ongoing effort on
dealing with this problem. Some subjects use strategy 2 to admit that they should bear the
responsibility. At the closing, Strategy 1 and Strategy 7 were used in 68.7% and 62.5% of
the 64 responses respectively. Strategy 5 was used in 14.1% of the responses.
The results indicate that when making favorable response, subjects prefer to use
positive-politeness strategies to enhance the impact of respecting to customers’ face.
They tend to state a short opening with greeting, appreciation, or apology, but the
opening is not necessary for all favorable responses. In order to satisfy the customers’
positive face, the subjects use more positive politeness strategies, and prefer to convey
the good news directly by not keeping the customer guessing about the company’s
intentions or decisions for long time. They begin with the main idea of the message—the
good news—and later go into details. Moreover, the apologizing strategy is also
employed frequently by the Chinese customer service staff when responding to customer
complaints to weak the impact of the undesirable events. The subjects tend to close their
responses by expressing their appreciation to the customers for their understanding and
for their past business, apologizing again to show their regret, or redress the customers’
want by expressing the desire for further service for the customer to redress the
customers’ wants.
4.2.2. Strategies in unfavorable responses
The unfavorable responses convey a bad-news message. So when making
unfavorable responses, subjects tend to be more careful and meticulous. The strategies of
unfavorable response used by subjects are shown in Table 4.3.
32
Table 4.3 Frequency of politeness strategies being used in unfavorable responses
(n=45)
Strategies of Positive-politeness
Strategies of Negative
(45.7%)
politeness (54%)
strategies
S. 1
S. 2
S. 3
S. 4
S. 5
Opening
17.8
57.8
93.3
(8)
(26)
(42)
Body part
Closing
S. 6
S. 7
S. 8
24.4
37.8
(11)
(17)
60.0
64.4
64.4
15.6
(27)
(29)
(29)
(7)
Total %
17.8
13.2
14.7
5.6
36.2
12.2
(196)
(35)
(26)
(29)
(11)
(71)
(24)
It is found that when making unfavorable response, negative-politeness strategies are
used more often. Strategy 7 is also used the most frequently (accounts for 36.2%) in
unfavorable responses. Unlike in favorable response, Strategy 2 has not been used at all,
while Strategy 3 and Strategy 6 have been used instead. The table shows that most of the
subjects begin their conversation with an apology and 57.8% of the responses begin with
strategy 3 in which the subjects express their understanding or concerning of the problem
in the beginning part of the response to show their sympathy; and 17.8% of responses
begin with Strategy 1 appreciating the customers first. In the body part, when rejecting
the customers’ complaints and requests, only in 11 responses (24.4%), subjects use
Strategy 6 to convey the refusal indirectly; while most of them prefer to give a clear and
firm rejection to the customers. However, in order to soften the impact of FTA of refusal,
77.8% of them explain the cause first and then refuse the customers with some soften
devices (which would be discussed in section 4.3) to reduce the customer’s anger. 37.8%
of the subjects use strategy 8 by describing some ongoing effort the company would
make as a partly compensation. In the closing part, Strategy 5 and Strategy 7 are used
more frequently both accounts for 64.4%. 60% of the responses end with Strategy 1
showing appreciation and compliment to the customers for their understanding. 15.6% of
33
the responses use Strategy 8 as their ending to express the willingness to help or give
alternatives or suggestions to redress some other wants of the customers.
The results indicate that to reduce the customers’ negative feelings, when making
unfavorable response, the Chinese customer service staff prefer some negative politeness
strategies to save the customers’ negative face. And the results of the present study
confirm the use of buffer openings, including apology, understanding, and appreciation.
As conveying the bad news, the consumer service staff tend to be much more careful
because customers who are complaining are emotionally involved and the rejection may
irritate them again. Thus, they apologize for the problem first, demonstrating that they
understand the problem and have considered the complaint; then they rationally explain
the cause of the problem before making the refusal; and end with a respectful and
action-oriented note to redress the FTA to customers.
4.2.3. Strategies in concessive responses
In the concessive situations, responses are composed of a partial acceptance and a
refusal. Thus, they are more complicated, as shown in Table 4.4.
Table 4.4 Frequency of politeness strategies being used in concessive responses
(n=51)
Strategies of Positive-politeness
Strategies of Negative
(67%)
politeness (28.2%)
strategies
S. 1
S. 2
Opening
9.8
80.4
86.7
(5)
(41)
(44)
Body part
Closing
Total %
(188)
S. 3
S. 4
S. 5
S. 6
72.5
17.6
(37)
(9)
S. 7
S. 8
84.3
90.1
17.6
(43)
(46)
(9)
25.5
(48)
21.8
(41)
19.7
4.8
(37)
(9)
34
23.4
(44)
4.8
(9)
Table 4.4 shows that in this situation, positive politeness strategies are used to much
more frequently to boost the effect of partly acceptance and avoid confrontation to
customers. It is found that Strategies 1, 7, and 2 are commonly used by subjects when
making concessive responses. The percentage of each item is 25.5%, 23.4% and 21.8%
respectively. Like in unfavorable responses, Strategy 6 is also used in this category. From
the table we can see that 86.4% of the responses begin with Strategy 7, which reveals that
most subjects prefer to show their regret and apology in the beginning part of their
responses. It was followed by Strategy 2, 80.4% of subjects begin their responses by
admitting their faults. In the body part, 72.5% of the subjects solicit an understanding in
this situation to reduce the customer’s anger. In closing, they use some strategies similar
to those they use in unfavorable situations, like Strategy 7 (90.1%), Strategy 1 (84.3%),
and Strategy 8 of giving suggestion or other help (17.6%).
In these situations, the consumers’ complaints are caused by something wrong done
by the company, so the complainee accepts the customers’ complaints honestly to boost
the customers’ positive face wants and show their willingness of solving the problems.
However, the offensive actions of the complaints cannot be compensated or repaired at
the moment for some reasons. The subjects have to refuse the customers’ request in a soft
way. The result reveals that most of the subjects apologizing and admitting their
responsibility at the very beginning of the responses to show their regret and establish
rapports with customers in order to mitigate the threatening of customers’ face. Some
subject use an indirect way to refuse the customers’ claim. Even though they choose to
refuse in a direct way, they prefer to soften the impact of the refusal by explaining the
reason of why they cannot approve the claim before the refusal to mitigate the threatening
of customers’ negative face.
4. 2.4 Internal Modification
To find out the internal modification used by complainees when responding to
customer complaints, the present study investigates the frequency of internal modifiers in
responses obtained from the DCT questionnaire. The result is shown in Table 4.5.
35
Table 4.5 Frequency of internal modification used by complainees (n=160)
n (%)
Cat. 1
Cat. 2
Cat. 3
Cat. 4
Cat. 5
133 (83.1)
81 (50.6)
94 (58.8)
37 (23.1)
57 (35.7)
From Table 4.5, it is obvious that Chinese customer service staff prefer to use
subjectivizers to indicate that they are involving in the events, and inform the customers
that the solution or the facts they are stating are their personal opinion in order to show
their sympathy and respect to the customers. The language patterns used by the subjects
include “I am afraid that…” “I think …” “I suppose…”, etc. Hedges are also used
frequently by the subjects to avoid precise propositional specifications, e.g. kind of, sort
of, somehow, etc. It is found that some expressions of apology are used by subjects when
they have to tell some bad news or refuse the customers; while good-news expressions
are used when they make favorable response to enhance the customers’ positive face and
consolidate the relationships with customers. Moreover, some subjects use “we” in stead
of “I” to give respect to customers and indicate that the response or the promise is made
not by himself/herself, but by the whole company to confirm the guarantee.
The results reveal that Chinese customer service staff use certain types of internal
modifiers to play down the impact of the undesirable events and ill consequence in order
to make the response sound more polite.
4.3 Relationships between Types/Strategies and the Severity Levels of Customer
Complaints
The seriousness or weightiness of a face-threatening act is compounded of both risk
to speaker’s face and risk to Hearer’s face, in a proportion relative to the nature of the
FTA (Brown & Levinson, 1987). According to Brown and Levinson (1987), the
weightiness of an FTA is affected by social distance (D), power (P), and the degree to
which the FTA is rated an imposition in that culture (R). But the social dimensions P, D,
and R can be viewed in various ways. A more plausible view would be that they are
“values attached not to individuals at all, but to roles and role-set” (Brown & Levinson
1987, p.78). Thus in the role-set customer / customer service staff, asymmetrical power is
36
built in. The customer complains to express his/her dissatisfaction or claim without much
precaution of politeness; while the complainee responds carefully in order to maintain the
relationship with the customer and minimize the face threat to the customer. Thus the
customer might be given a high rating in this situation, and the customer service staff a
low one perhaps. So how do the complainees’ response types and strategies vary with the
severity levels of customer complaints in this study? Table 4.6 shows the distribution of
types of responses to customer complaints in this study.
Table 4.6 Distribution of types of responses to customer complaints
responses
FR
scenario
n
CR
UR
%
n
%
n
%
1
14
70.0
2
10.0
4
20.0
2
3
15.0
5
25.0
12
60.0
3
1
5.0
16
80.0
3
15.0
4
3
15.0
13
65.0
4
20.0
5
18
90.0
2
10.0
0
0
6
2
10.0
3
15.0
15
75.0
7
6
30.0
7
35.0
7
35.0
8
17
85.0
3
15.0
0
0
The results disclosed that the subjects had similar choice in their response to each
complaint except in Scenario 7, for which the three types of responses clustered in the
similar percentage (account for 30%, 35%, and 35% respectively). For Scenarios 1, 5, 8,
most of the subjects chose favorable responses; for Scenarios 2, 6, most of them made
unfavorable responses; and for Scenarios 3 and 4, they accepted the complaint partially
but refused the customers’ claim. Table 4.7 shows the relationship between the severity
level of the customer complaints and the various types of responses.
37
Table 4.7 Distribution of types of responses to complaints according to the severity
level of customer complaints
FR
UR
CR
n (%)
n (%)
n (%)
Severe complaints
31 (77.5)
4 (10.0)
5 (12.5)
Less severe complaints
22 (36.7)
7 (11.7)
31 (51.7)
gentle complaints
11 (18.3)
34 (56.7)
15 (25.0)
Total
64
45
52
Severity levels
The table shows that 77.5% of the severe complaints are accepted by the subject and
only 10% are rejected; while more than half of the gentle complaints (56.7%) are
responded unfavorably and with only 18.3% favorably. As for the less severe complaints,
51.7% are responded with a pattern of “yes, but” – concessive response.
It indicates that complainees prefer to accept the severe complaint in order to
maintain a relatively peaceful climate and defuse the potentially explosive force of the
complaints. Since in this situation, the customers complain to the complainees “in the
most direct, clear, unambiguous and concise way possible, and the customer is vastly
superior in power to complainees, or even can enlist audience support to destroy the
complainees’ face” (Brown & Levinson 1987, p. 69). Thus, the complainees respond to
them carefully and favorably by indicating that in some aspects, they want the customers’
want to avoid harsher complaints or conflicts although this may loose their own face. In
this case, the potential face threat to the customers is minimized. On the opposite part,
when responding to gentle complaints, more complainees choose an unfavorable reaction.
They reject the complaints and refuse the customer’s request. In this situation, both the
customer and the complainee know that the past or ongoing offensive action (bad service
or product) which cause the complaint is not so serious. Thus, the customers express their
disapproval without much emotion or just convey a request, and the complainees respond
to the complaints without much consideration of the customers’ face. When the
complaint is less severe, the face want of the customer is not so serious or urgent, so
complainees make the concessive response by accepting the complaint carefully but
38
refuse the customer’s request or claim rationally to maintain the company’s interest
without an immediate confrontation.
39
Chapter Five
CONCLUSION
This chapter concludes the entire research. Section One summarizes the major
findings of the study. Section Two discusses some theoretical and pedagogical
implications. The limitations of the present study are presented in Section Three and
some suggestions for further research are given in Section Four.
5. 1 Major Findings
Basically, the present study was undertaken to explore the types of responses to
customer complaints and strategies used in responding to customer complaints in
business communication. The relationship between the severity level of customer
complaints and the response strategies was also investigated. In order to choose the
typical and effective complaint scenarios to form the DCT for the study, a preliminary
study was conducted by analyzing a random sample of 100 customer complaints against
an electronic company based in Shenzhen.
The selected subjects were 20 Chinese staff of customer relationship department in
an electronic company. With the instruments - written DCT, it examined the types of
response to customer complaints in business communication, and strategies used in
different types of complaint responses – including favorable response, unfavorable
response, and concessive response. It also tried to reveal the relationship between the
severity level of customer complaints and the response strategies. After quantitative
analysis, the study yielded the following findings:
(1) In business communication, Chinese customer service staff prefer to make
favorable responses to enhance the customers’ positive face, which is followed by
concessive responses. Unfavorable responses are the least used. As one of the most
important results of the present study, the finding proves some differences between daily
40
communication and business communication. It is indicated that, in business
communication, due to the profit and interest drives, the complainees react to the
complaints carefully and rationally in order to maintain a close relationship with
customers and avoid a true verbal confrontation. Thus, they choose to accept the
customers’ complaints frequently or make concessive responses much more than refusing
the customers.
(2) To redress the customers’ wants and avoid a direct confrontation with the
customers, company customer service staff use both the positive politeness strategies and
negative politeness strategies in responding to their customers’ complaints. In the case of
favorable responses, more positive politeness strategies are used to satisfy the customers’
positive face. When accepting the customers’ complaints and request, the complainees
prefer to convey the good news directly by not keeping the customers guessing about the
company’s intentions or decisions for long time. Moreover, the apologizing strategy is
also employed frequently. In the case of unfavorable responses, negative politeness
strategies are used more frequently to reduce the customers’ negative feelings and save
the customers’ negative face, such as apologizing or redressing the customers’ other
wants. The results of the present study confirm the use of buffer openings, including
apology, understanding, and appreciation. While in concessive responses, much more
positive strategies are used by subjects to enhance the customers’ positive face. In this
situation, apology and admitting responsibility are usually used at the very beginning of
the responses to show the complainee’s regret and establish rapports between complainee
and customers in order to mitigate the threatening of customers’ face. Complainee prefers
to soften the impact of the refusal by explaining the reason of why they cannot approve
the claim before the refusal. Moreover, it is revealed that certain types of internal
modifiers have been used to play down the impact of the undesirable events and ill
consequence in order to make the response sound more polite. In the current study,
complainee uses subjectivizers and hedges to show their sympathy and respect to the
customers. It is also found that some expressions of apology are used when complainees
have to tell some bad news or refuse the customers; good-news expressions are used
when they make favorable response to enhance the customers’ positive face and
consolidate the relationships with customers. Moreover, some complainees use “we” in
41
stead of “I” to shorten the distance with customers.
(3) In business communication, the Chinese customer service staff individually
consider certain variables e.g. face of their own or that of the others. When responding to
severe complaints, complainees prefer to accept the severe complaint in order to maintain
a relatively peaceful climate and defuse the potentially explosive force of the complaints
to save the customers’ face with a true preference for maintaining a non-conflictual tone
in the conversation. On the contrary, when responding to mild complaints, complainees
tend to choose unfavorable reactions. They reject the complaints and refuse the
customer’s request disregarding the customers’ want and work to get more profit rather
than redress the customers’ loss. Moreover, complainees prefer to accept the complaints
but refuse the customer’s request if the complaint is less severe to maintain the
company’s interest without an immediate confrontation with the customer.
5.2 Implications of this Study
Theoretically, this study may offer some insights for the exploration of the strategies
in speech act performance of complaint-response and may extend the Speech Act Theory
into the business domain. It shows that there are some specific strategies and internal
modifications in responses to customer complaints. No matter what the situation is, it has
to be handled effectively – make the customers feel good with the company products or
services and bring back their confidence in the company’s reputation.
Practically, the results of the present study might help Chinese employees in charge
of customer service become aware of the importance and difficulty they might meet with
when they try to respond to customer complaint and learn to use proper strategies to
respond to the complaints and get service recovery. It might help the companies or
organizations plan their procedures and guidelines for customer complaints handling. In
addition, to ensure the English patterns or language strategies are appropriately used for
handling complaints, the present study suggests that companies and organizations should
provide their employees with advanced customer complaint handling
Pedagogically, the present study suggests that it is necessary to design the advanced
business English training courses covering strategies for delivering good-news and
bad-news messages effectively, both in spoken and written communication, which could
42
be a guideline for Business English teachers to design better curriculum to address the
techniques for approving the customer’s claim and delivering bad news sensitively as
well as strategies to cope with complaints successfully.
5.3 Limitations of the study
Firstly, the sampling in this study was not big enough in size and restricted to one
electronic company. The tentative conclusion that has been drawn from the present study
might not be sufficiently generalizable to all the Chinese Business organizations.
Secondly, the subjects in this study were not representative enough as they were all
Chinese employees. Although they used English frequently in their routine work, English
was the foreign language for them. Therefore, it is difficult for us to draw a definite
conclusion of the natural form of how native speakers responded to customer complaints
by collecting data from them. Moreover, the gender difference of subjects may also affect
the result of the study. However, it was not taken into consideration in the study.
Last but not least, the data collection methods - a written DCT - was by no means
perfect and might bias the interpretation of the results as they were not able to elicit data
that provided full range of the concept of complaint - response strategies used by Chinese
customer service staff in joint venture companies.
5.4 Recommendations for Future Research
In spite of the various limitation of the present study, it may still shed some light on
future research. Future research could focus on the English language patterns or
expressions as well as strategies used for responding to customer complaints by native vs.
non-native speakers of English, so that findings can be compared. Also, the comparison
between spoken and written English used for handling complaints should be another topic
of interest. Finally, is it possible that such factors as genre, age, proficiency of English
and so on can also exert an influence on the ways of responding to customer complaints
in business communications? Future research may take these factors into consideration to
further to the study of the complaint response in business communications.
43
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APPENDIX: QUESTIONNAIRE
Part I: Demographic Data
Directions: Please give the answers to the following questions concerning your
personal data.
1. Gender
( ) 1 Male
( ) 2 Female
2. Age
( ) 20-25 years
( ) 26-30 years
( ) 31-35 years
( ) 36-40 years
( ) more than 40 years old
3. Education (The highest level of education)
( ) 1 Under Bachelor’s Degree
( ) 2 Bachelor’s Degree
( ) 3 Master Degree or higher
4. Work Experience
( ) 1-2 years
( ) 3-5 years
( ) 6-7 years
( ) 8-10 years
( ) more than 10 years
5. Use of English at work
( ) 1 Very often (every work day)
( ) 2 Often (3-4 days/week)
( ) 3 Sometimes (1-2 days/week)
Part II Discourse Completion Task
Directions: Read the following real-case scenarios about complaints made by
foreign customers at your company. You can respond these complaints by
accepting, refusing, or partially accepting according to the standards or regulations
of your company. Try to write your response as you feel you would say it in the
situation.
Complaint 1: I bought xx 5500 from a dealer in Guangzhou, and after a month the
keypad panel started giving problem. My dealer somehow did not agree to replace the set,
so I had to literally fight with him and the regional marketing in charge for a new set.
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After a month and a half, finally managed to get a new set. But the same problem arose
within 15 days again. Then, I came to your customer centre and called up them time and
time, but both the dealer and the customer care gave some excuses each time and asked
me to wait. After spending 3800 RMB, I am now in the worst possible soup. It’s made
life hell rather than easing it. I will never think of buying a xx set, and I have even started
advising the same to all.
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
Complaint 2: I have bought a xx model 6270 in June 2006. It has not been working
properly since last week. It is being hanged several times in a day. And this morning the
camera stopped working too. Can you tell me what’s wrong with my mobile phone? I had
thought your product had good quality! I’m disappointed! I think you should repair it for
me!
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
Complaint 3: The camera of my xx N70 mobile phone doesn’t work, so I sent my phone
to repair at your customer care centre in Luohu. But your staff of care centre informed me
the phone spare parts were out of stock and it would take at least two weeks for them to
be delivered. It is disgusting you know. Such small spare part you should be readily
available any time. What shall I do in the two weeks without a mobile phone? I was an
ardent fan of xx but now I am very much disappointed with your services.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Complaint 4: I bought a new xx 880 by 4000 RMB last month and the phone
switched-off automatically at least twice a day. Care centre says they have received some
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complaints about this phone but it’s difficult to fix it as software of the phone is not
available at that time and they asked me to call them up two days later. But when I called
them on that day, they had not the software yet. Then, I made the phone call the third
time and the forth, but still without a repair. What do I do even if it comes with a 2-year
warranty? Shame on you having troubled customer in this way.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Complaint 5: I bought a xx 6270 last week. But I found it had keypad problems. I
contacted your after-sale service department over the phone for replacement the new
mobile. The young man, number 807, answered my phone, but his response was very bad
and used very rude language. He did not even know how to behave with customers. How
can he deal with customer like this? I don’t think this man could follow xx’s value.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Complaint 6: I have a xx N70 for 2 years. But this morning, after a terrible crash, it
stopped working. Now, I am not able to receive calls, nor make any. Even if I tried
simply turning into the FM, the phone switched off on its own repeatedly. I’m so
disappointed of your product. I hope you can repair it for me.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Complaint 7: I am tired now. I bought my xx 6630 and to my surprise your Care centre
is not ready to format my MMC (Multi Media Chip). This is so torturing as I am not
getting any place where I can scan my MMC. Please help me where in south China,
especially in Guangdong Province, I can scan my MMC? I think it is your responsibility
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to format the MMC for me before my leaving the shop. How can you sell a product like
this?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Complaint 8: I just bought xx3250 and this phone has many problems, like bad network
transmission and headset clarity problem. I submitted my mobile for replacement to your
care centre in Dongguan. They said they could only repair it for me. But the next day, I
was told that they needed another two days. So, like this, they made me come again and
again, and each time they were giving an excuse. At last, they informed me that it could
not be repaired and I should call up the head office in Shenzhen. Why have I been made
to go there time and time and call up Shenzhen, and your staff sitting in Dongguan and
Shenzhen like bosses, and did not have the courtesy to even give one call to the
consumer? I was really tired. I hope you would give a detailed and satisfactory reply as
soon as possible. Otherwise, I will move to the consumer courts. This is the last call in
the matter.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
This is the end of the questionnaire. Thank you for your kind cooperation.
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