What verbal de-escalation techniques are used in complaint handling?

Abstract

The amount of outrage language, hate speech and strong language in digital communication is steadily growing, but academic studies on how to deal linguistically with anger and outrage are still largely lacking. Social science studies focus mainly on behavioral actions, while only a few investigate situations in which aggression is successfully handled verbally. On the other hand, complaint handling via webcare has received considerable scholarly attention, but its focus was never on de-escalation techniques. This paper explores what verbal de-escalation techniques can be learned from webcare employees who succeeded in satisfying complainants. More specifically, it combines insights from the (im) politeness framework and conversational human voice approach (CHV) to show that webcare practitioners have developed a tacit consensus on how to use language to deal with complaints. In a study with a mixed methods approach, a Twitter (now X) sample of responses to complaints is explored to identify linguistic and rhetorical features that encourage de-escalation. Thirteen features, that can be grouped into three categories, contributed to mollify the initial complainant. They can be characterized as markers of empathy (1), authenticity (2) and verbal accommodation (3) and they may help to calm heated debates in domains other than webcare. This article extends previous research by merging both pragma-linguistic and corporate communication taxonomies of complaint handling routines, adding forms of stylistic internal modification as possibly successful deescalation features.