 Diagnosis as Dialogue: Diagnostic Work in Calls to a Technical Support HelplineAlan Firth and Michael Emmison Chapter 7 in Ethnographies of Diagnostic Work, 2010, pp 113-132 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract The setting we describe in this chapter is Microsoft’s ‘technical support’ (telephone) call centre in Sydney, Australia, and the people we observe are call-taker ‘technicians’, talking with customers via telephone. For a charge of 42 Australian dollars (in 2002), callers throughout Australia and New Zealand can access the help-line and draw upon the expertise of the technicians, whose work revolves around two overarching tasks: (1) to elicit, diagnose and ‘treat’ the callers’ software-related problems during the actual call, where the caller, by following the real-time instructions of the call-taker, makes the necessary alterations or adjustments to his or her computer hardware and/or software; (2) to provide a text-based and computer-stored record or ‘catalogue’ of each call, to be used ‘in-house’ for various bureaucratic purposes, such as serving as reference material to inform return calls to or from the caller-customer. Keywords: Call Centre; Problem Description; Conversation Analysis; Computer Support Cooperative Work; Diagnostic Work (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-29693-0_7 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan |
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