Text analysis is increasingly used for consumer and marketing insight. But while work has shed light on what firms should say to customers, when to say those things (e.g., within an advertisement or sales interaction) is less clear. Service employees, for example, could adopt a certain speaking style at a conversation’s start, end, or throughout. When might specific language features be beneficial? This paper introduces a novel approach to address this question. To demonstrate its potential, we apply it to warm and competent language. Prior research suggests an affective (i.e., warm) speaking approach leads customers to think employees are less competent, so a cognitive (competent) style should be prioritized. In contrast, our theorizing, analysis of hundreds of real service conversations from two firms across thousands of conversational moments (N = 23,958), and four experiments (total N = 1,589) offer a more nuanced perspective. Customers are more satisfied when employees use both cognitive and affective language, but at separate, specific times. Ancillary analyses show how this method can be applied to other language features. Taken together, this work offers a method to explore when language matters, sheds new light on the warmth/competence trade-off, and highlights ways to improve the customer experience.

中文翻译：

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当语言很重要时

文本分析越来越多地用于消费者和营销洞察。但是，虽然工作已经阐明了公司应该对客户说些什么，但何时说这些话（例如，在广告或销售互动中）还不太清楚。例如，服务员工可以在对话开始、结束或整个过程中采用某种讲话风格。特定的语言功能什么时候可能有用？本文介绍了一种解决这个问题的新方法。为了展示它的潜力，我们将其应用到热情而称职的语言中。先前的研究表明，情感（即热情）的说话方式会导致客户认为员工能力较差，因此应优先考虑认知（有能力）的风格。相比之下，我们对两家公司的数百个真实服务对话进行了数千个对话时刻的理论分析（N = 23,958），以及四个实验（总计 N = 1,589），提供了更细致的视角。当员工在不同的特定时间同时使用认知语言和情感语言时，客户会更加满意。辅助分析显示了如何将该方法应用于其他语言特征。总而言之，这项工作提供了一种探索语言何时重要的方法，为热情/能力权衡提供了新的视角，并强调了改善客户体验的方法。