Program

Plenary

“Thank you for reaching out”: Re-visiting Invitational Rhetoric in Webcare a Decade Later

Valerie Creelman

With the advent of webcare, invitational rhetoric has enjoyed a resurgence as a critical concept for those scholars studying Conversational Human Voice (CHV) and how it’s operationalized in digital communications and customer care discourse. In their early efforts to define what communication style to use when delivering webcare, van Noort, Willemsen et al. (2015) identified invitational rhetoric (along with message personalization and informal speech) as one of three pervasive tactics contributing to a perceived conversational voice that organizations could enlist when participating in online customer care. By adopting an invitational approach, organizations could communicate their openness to customers’ thoughts and experiences and signal that they valued that feedback in a non-judgemental way.

When it was first integrated into discussions of webcare, invitational rhetoric was not a new concept. In this presentation, I re-visit the pillars of Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s (1995) groundbreaking work on invitational rhetoric to examine to what extent the external conditions of safety, value, and freedom that defined their framework for social interaction continue to find expression in online customer care and engagement today. In doing so, this discussion invites us to evaluate what role invitational rhetoric presently performs in initiating social interaction and establishing trust in the face of increasingly AI-mediated interactions and whether it needs to be re-articulated.

Designed to prompt reflection and invite audience members to share their perspectives, this session offers us the opportunity to re-examine invitational rhetoric in the era of Webcare 3.0 and how it is operationalized in a constantly evolving digital landscape populated not only with human webcare agents but also with AI ones, too.