De toegevoegde waarde van de taalbeheersing voor de verduidelijking van de conversational human voice

The concept of conversational human voice (CHV) was introduced in 2006 by
Kelleher and Miller indicating a personal, conversational style in online
organizational communication. The CHV measurement scale they presented
consists of eleven items, like ‘the brand treats me and others as human beings’
and ‘tries to be interesting in communication’. Various studies showed
positive effects of this style on organizational outcomes. In this paper we
examine the clearness of the notion of CHV. First, we tried to identify for each
strategy specific linguistic characteristics as found in the literature on conversations
and computer mediated communication. We succeeded for only
eight of the eleven strategies. For example, ‘tries to be interesting’ is not
directly translatable in linguistics characteristics. Next, we coded the linguistic
characteristics in a corpus of 540 webcare interactions. The coding showed
that the remaining eight strategies were partly overlapping, and were lacking
some essential characteristics of organizational conversational style as well.
We conclude that the current operationalization is not sufficient in capturing
CHV: On the one hand it is too restrictive because CHV seems to be more than
the eleven strategies; on the other hand it is too broad, because relations
cannot be determined unambiguously between these strategies and linguistic
characteristics.