Digitalization of the workplace and the products that companies sell to their customers has led to a situation where both workplace and customer interaction requires interacting with various technologies. For business professionals this means an ongoing challenge in developing new skills and routines not only in technology-mediated communication but also in training their customers to use their technology-enhanced products. Health technology companies marketing their smart devices are a case in point.
Our presentation focuses on this changing scene of customer training interaction in a health technology company that has developed a digital mobility stick for mobility measurement and exercise. The study is situated within technology-oriented workplace studies (e.g., Heath et al. 2000) where the role of technology in interaction and especially technology-mediated interaction has gained increasing attention (e.g., Heinonen et al. 2021). However, few studies have investigated the training of customers in using a new technology (=a specific type of object) or taken a longitudinal perspective, which would allow the exploration of how orientations to new technology change once the technology has become familiar. This is where our focus lies: we aim to shed light on the ways that business professionals and customers adjust to new technology in interaction.
We draw on ethnographic data collected from the above-mentioned health technology company in the spring of 2021, when the company was developing a new service concept around their product. The data include, for instance, video-recordings, observation and field notes of customer training interactions at two points in time, planning documents and interviews with the company representatives. Drawing on our ethnographic understanding of the development work, we zoom in to the video-recorded customer training interactions. Applying multimodal interaction analysis (Norris 2004) and multimodal conversation analysis of objects-in-interaction (e.g., Day and Wagner 2019), we show how in their first meetings with the customers, the company representative mediates between the customer and the new technology before the customer learns to interpret and subsequently use the technology on their own, and how in the second meetings the customer has become an active user of the technology.
Our longitudinal analysis suggests that the newness versus familiarity of the technology as a specific type of object is consequential to the interaction and the progressivity of action (cf. Nevile 2019). The findings shed light on the complex communicative competences needed in technologized business settings.
References
Day, D., and Wagner, J. (Eds.) (2019). Objects, Bodies and Work Practice. Multilingual Matters.
Heath, C., Knoblauch, H. and Luff, P. (2000). Technology and social interaction: The emergence of 'workplace studies'. British Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 299–320.
Heinonen, P., Niemi, J. and Kaski, T. (2021/aop). Changing participation in web conferencing: The shared computer screen as an online sales interaction resource. Applied Linguistics Review.
Nevile, M. (2019). Objects of agreement: Placing pins to progress collaborative activity in custom dressmaking. In D. Day & J. Wagner (Eds.) Objects, Bodies and Work Practice. Multilingual Matters, pp. 3–32.
Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework. Routledge.
