How Important is Communication Style in Chat Reference?

Abstract

Chat operators sometimes struggle to find a communication style that balances approachability and warmth with professionalism and authority. Both formal and informal communication styles have benefits and drawbacks that may affect patron satisfaction. Consequently, it may be difficult for chat operators to decide how to communicate with users, and for chat service managers to decide if communication style should be part of a service’s training and policies. This article reports on a study of chat transcripts from a collaborative chat reference service in Ontario, Canada. We compared operator communication style with users’ willingness to return, and included user and query type as moderating variables. The study used two samples: 299 randomly selected interactions and 217 interactions with negative or neutral exit survey responses. Chi square tests of independence showed a significant relationship between communication style and willingness to return in the dissatisfied sample, but not the random sample. There was a significant relationship between informality and willingness to return for faculty members and for research questions but only in the dissatisfied sample. We conclude that an operator’s choice to communicate either more formally or informally will not make users more satisfied, but it can help avoid leaving them dissatisfied, especially for faculty members and during research-intensive questions.

Keywords:

• Chat reference
• communication styles
• formality
• transcript analysis

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank Sabina Pagotto and Amy Greenberg of Scholars Portal for their contributions to the research team, especially their roles in data preparation and transcript coding.

Notes

1 While this label may seem to indicate satisfaction, we felt that its position in the middle of a five-point Likert scale indicated that the user was less satisfied than satisfied and thus included it in our dissatisfied sample.