“Helping you to pay us”: Rapport management in debt collection call centre encounters

Abstract

This paper investigates the rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2005) that collections agents at a UK-based utilities company call centre are expected to perform during debt collection telephone interactions. It examines the rapport-relevant information communicated in the textual materials, including training manuals, through which a prescribed debt collection style is implemented. The analysis reveals that there are tensions in the rapport-concerns that collectors must attend to when using the style. Collectors are instructed to perform potentially face-threatening behaviours in order to collect debt, whilst simultaneously engaging in linguistic behaviour that may be interpreted as face-enhancing and which functions to develop rapport with the debtor. It is suggested that the local deployment of this contradictory “helping you to pay us” philosophy is problematic on multiple levels and may give rise to relational tensions between collectors and debtors who have conflicting expectations about rapport management entitlements. In turn, this may contribute to a culture of sanctioned face-attacks in call centres (Archer and Jagodziński 2015). Therefore, I suggest that call centres may need to loosen the synecdochical hold they have over their employees, thereby affording them the flexibility and volition to cope with the complex face demands, unpredictability and potential volatility of debt collection encounters.

Narrative practices in debt collection encounters

“…From my ethnographic knowledge of this organisation from another research project (Harrington, 2019) and experience of working in the DC industry (Harrington, 2018), I would agree with this characterisation of North CU having a distinctly ethical and responsible ethos.…”

“…Firstly, the collector's debtorcentric narrative practices provide empirical evidence of DC being performed with respect, empathy, and compassion for indebted individuals (see Harrington, 2019). This offers an alternative characterisation of DC communication to those that assert that it prototypically imposes on debtors (Harrington, 2018). Additional, non-interactive data would be required to determine whether indebted individuals' experiences of this debtor-centric DC communication aligned with the unpleasant and threatening experiences of DC that have been reported in previous research (Custers, 2017).…”

“…In most call centre professional-lay encounters, alignment with a lay-person's extended contributions or tangential talk is highly discouraged because it reduces employees' overall productivity. For instance, Harrington (2018) describes how small talk lengthens call times. Consequently, we may expect to find interactive moves that similarly disalign (Stivers, 2008) with narrative production in DC contexts.…”

“…Research in sociolinguistics, socio-pragmatics, and occupational health has established that call centres, especially in large organisations, are typically characterised by "routinisation, repetitiveness and general absence of employee control" (Belt et al, 2002, p. 21). To increase productivity and quality assurance, call centres often prescribe and proscribe their employees' linguistic practices (see Cameron, 2000;Harrington, 2018;Jagodzinski, 2013). It was, therefore, unusual that, in a telephone-mediated role, Sam's interactions were not stringently regulated and monitored.…”

“…This paper contributes to this established and growing body of multidisciplinary scholarship by extending the analysis of narrative practices to debt collection encounters, the primary aim of which is to recover money that is owed to an organisation. This professional-lay context, which has only become the subject of empirical linguistic study in very recent years (Harrington, 2018(Harrington, , 2019, provides a new, unique and unexplored ground for narrative research in organisational settings. In particular, I focus on how a debt collector in a credit union orients to indebted individuals' narratives in this context and, as an integrated part of the analysis, explore what can be understood about organisational values and principles from these findings.…”