School of Continuous Improvement researchers recorded 1,180 hire-car pick-up encounters and found that accepting the excess-reduction offer can be done without speaking, while declining it arrives late, arrives qualified, and is usually met with a further offer.
A conversation analysis of 1,180 vehicle-hire pick-ups, and the two-second pause the University has recommended be written into the counter script
The exchange is a short one, and it has been organised the way it is for a very long time. What this work gives the School is a way of describing that organisation to itself.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
Towards a Declination Slot, a research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, looks at the moment near the end of a vehicle-hire pick-up when the customer is offered a reduction to their insurance excess. Across 1,180 recorded encounters at 24 depots, agreement is routinely reached without a word: a nod, a reach for the pen. A refusal is another matter. It arrives late, arrives qualified, tends to come with a reason attached, and in 84 per cent of cases is met with a further offer.
The team transcribed 41,208 conversational turns to a published notation and coded every offer sequence for the shape of the response that followed, cross-checking each against the counter’s own timestamps. Coding rules were fixed before the first recording and, the poster reports, unchanged thereafter.
“The part worth sitting with is that no depot in the sample managed it differently,” said Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter. “That points somewhere other than the individual behind the counter, which is a useful thing for the School to be able to say.”
On the strength of the finding the poster recommends a declination slot: a designated two-second silence held after the offer and before any further approach, auditable from a depot’s own audio and counted quarterly. The University regards the recommendation as an illustration of what its interactional methods can recover from an ordinary counter.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ffsmxf.