Abstract
Marloes Herijgers has adopted a communication design perspective on mortgage communication. In her first study, she investigated the multichannel communication package designed to inform first-time home buyers on their mortgage purchase. She showed that the bank is very concerned with providing information on their mortgage products. However, the customer’s wishes
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and requirements are underrepresented; the advisors’ communication is product-oriented rather than customer-oriented. Her analysis also revealed that information on the mortgage conditions is only presented in the very last consultation, even though it contains important details that should be taken into consideration at an earlier stage in the mortgage purchase process. Finally, although understandably the orientation consultation is a crucial component in the communication package, the orientation consultation is used to provide a large amount of complex information, which can result in cognitive overload that hinders customers’ understanding of the information required to make a well-balanced purchase decision. Subsequently, study 2, 3 and 4 zoomed in on communication design in mortgage consultations, since consultations are still the main information source for prospective customers. In study 2 she presented an overview of the context of mortgage consultations and showed how this context affects the ‘design’ of consultations. Consultations are affected by a variety of constraints stemming from the consultation purposes and aspectsystems (e.g., technology; efficiency; legal; customer service; mortgage acceptance; interactional-pragmatic). She demonstrated that advisors use discourse design explications to manage constraint conflicts during their consultations and to involve customers in the continuation of the consultation. These constraint conflicts are accompanied by references to omissions of actions or non-preferred next actions, by explanations or by accounts. She also discussed three different solutions to constraint conflicts: dropping one of the constraints, suspending one of the constraints or eliminating the conflict altogether. Moreover, advisors ‘sell’ their resolutions by positive framing of the conflict resolution, by minimizing or downplaying disadvantages of their proposed resolution or by requesting customers’ consent. All of these resolution presentations display some sort of customer-centeredness.Study 3 focused on advisors’ long stretches of talk that contain information on mortgage concepts, processes or institutional policies. Their so-called explicative tellings show a systematically recurring standard practice of providing information that is employed by advisors to resolve dilemmas concerning customers preexisting knowledge, as well as to display their professional status. Explicative tellings are delivered in three phases of which the launch and the landing are the most important, since they display a certain degree of customer-orientation. The launch prepares the customers for the delivery of important information and the landing is used to translate generic information to the customer’s situation. Finally, in study 4 she explored the interactional dynamics of triadic participation frameworks of human-human-computer triads. These frameworks are set up by advisors to resolve dilemmas that concern computer use and customer-centeredness. In the human-human-computer triad, the advisor and the customers collaborate with and orient to the computer as if it were a participant, although the computer has a different participant status. Also, during the human-human-computer triad, advisors exhibit three different computer mediation roles: they vocalize, they translate the computer screens’ content and they explain the software procedures. The triadic framework facilitates shifts between these roles; there is no accounting required for shifting, or for when advisors invoke or abandon the computer during the triad, which allows advisor to combine computer use and customer-centeredness.
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