Abstract The business world is fast entering a virtual environment where technology is applied in all areas to improve efficiency. For example, web-based synchronous chat has become a popular way of communication for customer support. However, we note that business managers and customers bemoan the amount of time taken to serve customers via webchat, caused in some part perhaps by the textual route to get to a resolution using this new media. This has received little attention from the research world. We therefore collected 15 customer service webchat exchanges from an international online retail company and explored the challenges by looking at the generic structural moves, their impact on the time to resolution and the linguistic affordances of webchat. It was found that webchat moves highly depend on the type of business, company policies and division of labor in contact centre. Some webchat affordances such as allowing for URLs to lengthy webpages and long lists of instructions can lead to communication breakdowns. 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.

中文翻译：

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聊天流程中发生了什么？电子商务客服微信交流的举动分析

摘要 商业世界正在迅速进入一个虚拟环境，在这个环境中，技术被应用于各个领域以提高效率。例如，基于 Web 的同步聊天已成为客户支持的流行通信方式。但是，我们注意到业务经理和客户对通过网络聊天为客户提供服务所花费的时间感到遗憾，这在某种程度上可能是由于使用这种新媒体解决问题的文本途径所致。这在研究界很少受到关注。因此，我们从一家国际在线零售公司收集了 15 个客户服务网络聊天交流，并通过查看一般结构性变化、它们对解决时间的影响以及网络聊天的语言可供性来探索挑战。发现网络聊天的动作高度依赖于业务类型，联络中心的公司政策和分工。一些网络聊天功能，例如允许指向冗长网页的 URL 和长指令列表，可能会导致通信中断。该分析的结果可以成为在线客户服务代表的职前培训和辅导以及高等教育中很少关注此类类型的商务沟通课程的宝贵资源。