“Doesn’t Really Answer My Question . . .”: Exploring Customer Service Interactions on Twitter

Abstract

This article explores customer service interactions between the Irish airline Ryanair and its passengers on the social networking platform Twitter. Using a corpus linguistic methodology, it investigates a 1-million-word corpus of Twitter threads comprising tweets addressed to and posted by Ryanair between August 2018 and July 2019. Studying the communicative strategies used in the corpus reveals customers’ main concerns and causes for complaint, and how the airline addresses these in their response tweets offering assistance to passengers. In addition, the analysis of customer response tweets to these corporate replies allows insights into customers’ reactions to and perception of the (often generic) answers they receive. The aim of this case study is to gain further understanding of the linguistic and communicative features that characterize customer service interactions online, and the attitudes customers voice toward them, with a view to streamlining customer communication and improving levels of customer satisfaction.