CX and Co / Recovery

The apology that is not an apology

Regret about someone's feelings is not the same as responsibility for your actions.

There is a well worn formula that expresses regret that a person feels a certain way, or apologises for any inconvenience caused, and takes responsibility for nothing. Everyone recognises it. It is the sound of an organisation protecting itself, and it lands as an insult on top of the original problem, because the customer now has two grievances: the fault, and the performance of concern about the fault.

A real apology has three plain parts. It says what went wrong in concrete terms. It says who is responsible without hiding behind the passive voice or an unnamed system. And it says what will happen now, with a time attached. Notice that none of this requires legal risk taking or extravagant compensation. It requires specificity, which is the thing that carefully drafted formulas are designed to avoid.

The related failure is being told the policy rather than the reason. A policy is an answer to a question the customer did not ask. It explains that a decision cannot be changed without explaining why the rule exists, and it invites the reasonable suspicion that nobody knows. People accept no far more readily than organisations expect, provided the no comes with a reason that makes sense. What they will not accept is being handed a rule as though it were a fact of nature.