Written communication for customer satisfaction services

As a result of the increasing market demands, the use of language within Customer Service Departments (CSD) has become a decisive factor to achieve customer satisfaction. However, even if the business community has provided these departments with guidelines and courses on oral communication, written language has been mostly unattended. This paper focuses on written communication in CSD by studying their responses to complaints, suggestions and demands. In this study 19 messages issued by some of the most relevant companies in the Galician business landscape are analysed. For that purpose, the following language aspects are taken into consideration: structure, orthography and orthotypography, punctuation, grammar, lexicon, coherence, cohesion, language sexism and politeness. The results indicate that those texts written by CSD show language problems which could lead to customer dissatisfaction. By implementing guidelines such as developing style manuals or hiring personal with appropriate language training these problems can be minimized and the company image enhanced.