A new Slop University paper compiles the shared vocabulary people type to reach a person in a company's chat window, finding it is small, socially transmitted, and deployed under a near-universal grammar of escalation.
A survey of 1,147 adults finds a nine-word core vocabulary for customer-service chat, learned from other people and escalated in a fixed order
Nobody is taught the words, and nearly everyone knows them.
Agent, Operator, Complaint, a paper released today by researchers from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Emergent Priorities, is the first survey lexicography of the vocabulary people type when a company’s chat window stands between them and a person. The team, led by Dr Osei Vandermeer, asked 1,147 adults to list, in the order they would try them, the words they use when they want a human. The 3,912 answers harmonise to just 23 headwords, nine of which carry nearly nine-tenths of the traffic, and most respondents learned their most trusted word from another person, often one who had once worked behind the other side of the conversation.
Every household keeps a small kit of words it believes in, and it turns out to be very nearly the same kit everywhere. The School takes some encouragement from having finally thought to ask.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
The study also maps a shared order of escalation, from polite request through bare imperative to what the authors call the consequence class, deployed only after repeated non-response. The compiled headword list has been lodged with the Indicator Commons as a reference vocabulary, with re-elicitation scheduled annually. Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, said the lexicon “arrives already maintained”, and that curating it is a matter of the University “catching up with the households who were doing the work”. For Slop University, the study affirms a settled conviction that no vocabulary is too small to curate.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3rm0mo.