Abstract
As the number of international tourists increases, treating their complaints by using appropriate language as well as a professional attitude has become crucial. However, there has been a notable lack of research that compares how effectively customer service representatives in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom use language in complaint handling. Therefore, the present study investigates the language use in complaint handling in these three countries by employing internet- based discourse completion tests. These tests are administered to more than 300 customer service representatives from each country and focused on different degrees of business responsibility. The findings reveal that the Japanese participants sincerely apologized（in some cases, at least twice）and promised future improvements, whereas the Americans and Britons attempted to meet the needs of the customers by honoring their coupons or stating that they are focusing on the customer’s benefits. The results apply the linguistic perspective and revise the complaint resolution model elaborated by the author in previous research. This revision shows that Japanese service representatives tend to use psychological recovery through negative politeness, whereas Americans and Britons generally respond with economic service recovery through positive politeness while dealing with complaints.
