The Effect of Gender on Politeness Using Watts’ Theory in Customer Service Outsourcing Call Centers: A Socio-pragmatic Study

Abstract

The current study explores the language of outsourcing customer service call centers involving Egyptian call-takers and Canadian callers interacting in various types of communicative tasks [e.g., troubleshooting a technical problem or processing/placing orders for products or services] and communicating in English as a Lingua Franca. The main goal of the study isto conduct a corpus based conversation analysis of transcribed callsof outsourcing call center interactions to show to what extent linguistic politeness is applied to the customer/agent interaction according to Watts’ (2003) politeness theory. Moreover, it measures the effect of gender on politeness in the interaction. The data for analysis includes36 calls divided into 4 groups; Female Customer-Female Agent, Female Customer-Male Agent, Male Customer-Female Agent and Male Customer-Male Agent. The data has been collected randomly from an outsourcing call center company located in Cairo, Egypt, as all the subjects are Egyptian Agents and Canadian Customers. The results of the study confirm that the gender factor and the linguistic politeness in outsourcing call centers have important implications for the study of language. The results showthat 63% of the calls use the politic behavior, 29.8% use the polite behavior and only 7.2% use the impolite behavior. Thus, agents who depend on the gender to handle their customers tend to use im(polite) behavior, while agents who do not count on the gender factor tend more to use the politic behavior. Finally, the functional features, distribution, and statistical results of linguistic data presented in the current study would have potentially useful application in the design and implementation of training programs for agents in outsourcing call centers specifically those located in Egypt serving Canadian customers.