Effects of the amount of shared information on communication efficiency in side by side and remote help dialogues

If the sharing of context is now widely acknowledged as a condition for successful communication, existing studies do not allow to determine whether it is necessary to restore the maximum of shared information to obtain the best communicative performance. To address this issue, three help dialogue conditions distinguished by the amount of shared information, are compared. The analyses are focused on the comprehension problems raised by each condition. The results highlight that the quality of a help dialogue is not necessarily linked to the quantity of shared information. They also exhibit that the inability to share some specific information strongly affects communication efficiency. Implications for the design of computer-mediated communication systems are drawn from these results 1. Problem and objectives Given the current rapid growth of telephone companies providing support to customers (some call centers include more than 2000 agents and handle more than 200 000 calls per day, Rob Walters, 1996), there is a great interest in reducing the time of each communication. As Muller et al. (1995) claimed, « savings of even a tenth of a second per call are multiplied into significant corporate economies.* One way to reduce communication time in remote settings could be to enhance the sharing of information between the caller I will call him the « novice » — and the helper --1 will call her the « expert» (for convenience, I will use in the