Saying ‘No’ in Philippine-based outsourced call center interactions

Because of the increasing need to trim customer service business expenses, many companies from the USA have outsourced telephone-based customer service operations to Asian countries, such as India and the Philippines. Available human resources and relatively cheap labor have been the incentives for US companies to move their customer service operations overseas, in part to improve their financial position. This study focuses on Filipino customer service agents’ ways of saying ‘No’–refusing a customer’s request for support, denying service, or delivering ‘bad news’ after an inquiry in this context of cross-cultural, telephone-based service encounter. These occurrences of denials/refusals are investigated using the conventions of modified Discourse and Conversation Analysis. Institutional talk in call centers involves transactions following question-and-answer sequences which show explicit relationship between participants’ social roles (e.g. as caller/customer vs. call-taker/agent) and the communicative structure of talk in which they engage. It is relevant to qualitatively investigate the motivation and behavioral norms that account for interactional patterns of agents’ refusal of service as illustrated in call transcripts. Interpretations of transcripts show how these refusals affect the overall flow of transaction, the behavior of customers, and how business is maintained during the call.