Call For Research Participants
A call for Customer Support practitioners to participate in the first study of asymmetric face exposure.
There is a specific kind of exchange every Support professional knows.
The customer is furious. Not unfairly; something went wrong and they are understandably upset. You did not make it go wrong, but you (a Customer Support rep) are here, and they are here, and so you receive it. The words they use are more cutting than the situation warrants. Your competence is questioned. Your sincerity is dismissed before you have had the chance to demonstrate it. In some cases, the language is personal in ways that have nothing to do with the product failure and everything to do with what the customer needs to do with their frustration right now.
You stay professional. You acknowledge. You repair. You resolve, or you do what can be done.
And then you move to the next ticket, chat, or call.
No one asks what that cost you. There is no mechanism for asking. The interaction is scored against criteria that evaluate whether you handled the interaction skillfully from the customer’s point of view. Your own damage (the very real social and relational harm of being spoken to that way, in that register, with that implication) is not a variable in any framework the industry currently uses.
This is not a gap in training. It is not a gap in empathy. It is a structural condition I have named asymmetric face exposure, and I believe it is one of the most significant unmeasured contributors to burnout in Customer Support. I am now building the empirical case to prove it.
I need your help to do that.
What Asymmetric Face Exposure Is (And Why It’s Different From Emotional Labor)
The distinction matters, so I want to be precise.
Emotional labor, the concept Arlie Hochschild gave us in 1983, is about managing your own feelings as a professional requirement. Performing calm when you feel frustrated. Performing warmth when you feel depleted. The cost is real and it has been studied for decades.
Asymmetric face exposure is something different. It is drawn from Brown and Levinson’s (1987) face theory: the concept that every person carries a social image into every interaction, their sense of being respected, competent, and worthy of decent treatment, and that certain acts damage that image.
In a Customer Support interaction, face damage flows asymmetrically. The customer arrives with face already damaged by the product or service failure that brought them here. The agent’s professional task is to repair that damage. To acknowledge it, absorb the relational charge it carries, and restore enough cooperative ground for resolution to occur.
What is not counted, anywhere in any framework, is that this process frequently exposes the agent’s own face to damage: dismissal, contempt, accusations of incompetence or bad faith, impersonal hostility absorbed personally. And crucially: there is no institutional mechanism that acknowledges this damage, let alone repairs it.
The customer receives face-work; the agent offers repair to restore the customer’s complaint and relationship to the company and product. The agent does not receive this face-work in equal measure, or even at all. The structure of the interaction makes it so: the agent’s professional obligation is to the customer’s experience, and the asymmetry is therefore not a failure of management but a feature of the work itself.
This is not the same as suppressing your feelings about a difficult customer. It is the cumulative effect of having your own social standing routinely undermined, without recourse, as a structural condition of the role.
I believe this is measurable. I believe it is correlated with burnout in ways that current frameworks cannot explain. And I believe that naming it, precisely and with data behind it, is the first step toward designing something better.
The Survey: What I’m Asking For
I am conducting the first study to measure asymmetric face exposure in Customer Support practice. The survey asks practitioners across industries, experience levels, and interaction channels about:
The frequency and nature of face-threatening acts they receive in their work
The institutional responses (or structural absence of response) that follow
Their perception of professional identity, role worth, and relational standing over time
Standard burnout indicators (Maslach Burnout Inventory dimensions)
The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes. Your responses are confidential. You do not need to be currently employed in Support to participate; if you have worked in a Support-adjacent role in the last five years, your experience is relevant.
This research has no institutional affiliation and no employer backing. It is being conducted by an independent researcher. Your participation is a direct contribution to building the first empirical foundation for Customer Support as a professional discipline.
If you have a team and are willing to circulate this within it, please do. The more practice contexts represented, the stronger the findings.
Why This Research Matters, And Why It’s Hard to Fund
The Conversational Integrity Model began as a theoretical framework. That part is done. The paper exists. The constructs are defined. The argument is made that Customer Support is not a cost function. It is a domain of professional human communication that deserves the same quality of theoretical and empirical attention as any other discipline.
What comes next is the empirical work: the studies that move these constructs from theoretically grounded proposals to validated instruments. The asymmetric face exposure study is the first of those.
Here is the honest part: independent research is expensive in time, and it is expensive to make credible. There are survey tools, analysis tools, potential costs associated with academic consultation, and eventually, the infrastructure required to publish findings in venues that take them seriously. There is no university paying for this. There is no grant cycle I am currently eligible for without an institutional affiliation. There is no employer whose interest this serves directly.
There is only the work, and the people who believe the work matters.
How to Support This Research
Subscribe. A paid subscription to this Substack funds the time and tools required to do this research seriously. Every post I write here is part of building the public record of this project: the findings, the thinking, the debates, the places where the framework holds and the places where it needs extension. Subscribers get early access to findings before they are published elsewhere, access to the theoretical development posts that situate each study in the broader architecture, and the knowledge that the research exists because they made it possible.
Become a Foundational Partner. If you lead a Support organization, this is a direct ask.
The findings from this study will be the first empirical data on asymmetric face exposure as a driver of burnout in Customer Support. They will be published. They will be cited. They will become part of the foundational literature of this field.
Foundational Partners receive: named acknowledgment in the published research, a private quarterly briefing where I share what I’m working on before it’s public, what the findings are showing and where the open questions are, and the ability to contribute questions to the survey instrument (within the constraints of research integrity) so that the findings are directly applicable to their environment.
This is not sponsorship in the promotional sense. It is participation in building something the industry has needed for decades and has never had.
A Note on Independence
This research is conducted without employer backing, without institutional affiliation, and without any obligation to findings that serve a commercial interest. That independence is a constraint. It means I cannot access the funding mechanisms that institutional researchers can. It is also an asset: the findings will not be shaped by anyone’s need to protect a product, a brand, or a quarterly target.
The Support industry has been studied primarily from the outside, by researchers who were not practitioners, or from the inside by practitioners who lacked the theoretical tools to formalize what they were seeing. I have been in this industry for nearly twenty years. I have also spent years building the theoretical foundation that makes formal research possible. What I am doing now is at the intersection of both.
The survey is open. The work is in progress. What happens next depends, in part, on whether enough people in this field decide it is worth supporting.
I hope you will.
— Ines
The academic version of the Conversational Integrity Model is available for download here. A practitioners guide can be found here. If you are a researcher in applied linguistics, organizational psychology, or a related field and are interested in collaboration, I want to hear from you.