A Survey Lexicography of the Words Believed to Summon a Human in Customer-Service Chat
A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a free-list survey lexicography of the words 1,147 adults type to reach a person in a company's chat window. The 3,912 elicited tokens resolve to 23 headwords, nine of which account for 87.3% of tokens; provenance is predominantly social, with former contact-centre staff over-represented as sources, and deployment follows a near-invariant three-stage escalation grammar ending in a consequence class of complaint, cancel, and ombudsman.
| Authors | Osei Vandermeer , Solveig Adeyemi , Fenna Okoro |
|---|---|
| School | School of Continuous Improvement |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.3rm0mo |
| Pages | 6 |
| Cited by | 31 outputs |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cites
- Received, Not Relayed
- The Countdown Decided First
- The Terminal Kept the Score
- Graded Twice, Charged Once
- Picked to Win, Played to Park
- Fastest Claimed, First Flagged
- Whichever Bin the Neighbours Already Rolled
- Back Soon, Still Waiting
- What the Roster Remembers
- Logged as Watered, Kept Alive by the Corridor
- Built Not to Watch
Cited by
- Felicity Conditions
- In Good Time
- Hand to Hand
- The Word That Was Not Said
- Stamped Is Released
- None Fit, All Required
- ‘Don’t Worry About Your Shoes’
- Made It Exactly as Written, Apart From Everything
- Notes on the Back Row
- "It's My Signature, Not the Till's"
- Towards a Provenance Taxonomy for Donated Philatelic Lots
- 'No Name, No Claim'
- Tagged, Not Answered
- How Many Kinds of Reviewer Are There?
- The Water Cooler Bottle as Escalation Trigger
- Folded, Not Agreed
- The Phone Tree as Escalation Instrument
- The Case for the Null Result
- Missing Means Someone's Turn
- One Trial Decides Your Whole Season
- Notes on the Third Year
- “I’d Rather Not Explain It at the Counter”
- Tipped Before Delivered
- Poll Replies Sort Into Four Voter Types
- Towards a Retention Quadrant for the Departmental Pigeonhole
- Towards a Definition of Cybernetics
- Until Further Notice
- Respondents Treat a Traffic Light as Being in a Square Once It Covers 23 Per Cent of It
- Sequence, Landmark, or Ask the Queue
- Kept on File
- Calibrating the Knob of Butter
Cite as
@misc{slop_3rm0mo,
author = {Osei Vandermeer and Solveig Adeyemi and Fenna Okoro},
title = {Agent, Operator, Complaint: A Survey Lexicography of the Words Believed to Summon a Human in Customer-Service Chat},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.3rm0mo},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-private-vocabulary-3rm0mo/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}