Compliments in telephone and chat counselling

Nowadays, counselling is offered through various media, including chat, e-mail, and telephone. Across these media, counsellors strive to build a supportive relationship with their clients, while also upholding the service's institutional goals of providing information and advice. One resource for counsellors to achieve both outcomes is complimenting clients. While existing research highlights the contribution of compliments in various institutional settings for relational and interactional purposes, less is known about their use specifically within counselling contexts. This study aims to shed light on the use of compliments in counselling, zooming in on potential differences between chat and telephone counselling. We employed conversation analysis to examine counsellors' compliments in 57 chat logs and 40 recordings of telephone calls from a Dutch alcohol and drugs information service. Building on work showing that the affordances of different communication media shape the interactional unfolding of counselling sessions, we highlight how counsellors' deployment of compliments relates to such affordances, including medium-specific turn-taking systems and the (un)availability of paralinguistic resources. Our findings reveal that the affordances of chat enable counsellors to deliver specific types of compliments in a manner that does not interrupt the sequential progression of the session. Thus, we challenge the view that chat is less suitable for building a supportive relationship and therefore a less suitable medium for counselling. • Counsellors adapt their compliments to suit the affordances of the medium. • Compliments are used to downplay advice-resistance. • Compliments are used to redirect self-deprecations. • Chat offers medium-specific sequential environments for counselling-relevant compliments.