Texting, common in social media, is fast becoming the norm in the workplace. For example, webchat for customer service is becoming increasingly favoured in the contact centre industry. Businesses predicted a few years back that this form of customer service would soon supersede telephonic support for sales and customer support, and this is increasingly the case.

Webchat for customer service is, however, faced with challenges in terms of quality, particularly in outsourced destinations in Asia where English is used as a second language. Also, like any new application of technology for communication, there is a great deal to uncover in how this new media works for business from a language point of view. This study, of which Assistant Professor at CityU’s Department of English, Dr XU Xiaoyu, is one of the researchers, therefore collected 15 customer service webchat exchanges from an international online retail company and explored the challenges by looking at the average handling time, the structure of communication, and the affordances of online platforms.

The rich data has uncovered several features that can shed light on ways of improving communication for contact centres. It was found that customers were likely sent to the wrong agents/departments and they are forced to go through many transfers and having to repeat their problems. To improve the accuracy of assigning the right agents, contact centres can further embrace technology such as machine learning. However, in the likelihood of transfer, agents should be trained with the soft skill of reading and summarising chat history and showing an understanding of the key issues.

It was also found that the structure of communication highly depends on the type of business, company policies and division of labour in contact centres. The researchers suggest that for a genre that depends extensively on specific business needs, companies can conduct genre analyses of their own webchat data for training materials that fit in their context best. This has implications for training key stakeholders on how to carry out such analyses, and how to convert the findings into practical solutions.

The data has shown that some agents can take advantage of such affordances of webchat and shift responsibility to the customers for finding the right instructions, thereby solving their own problems. This should be taken into account in contact centre training programmes to remind agents of their supportive roles when it comes to the convenience afforded by digital media.

The results of this analysis can be a valuable resource for the pre-employment training and coaching of online customer service representatives as well as for business communication courses in higher education where little attention is given to such genre.