Today, we’ll discuss the elements of truly great apologies–with examples. And see what we can learn from the experience I had recently apologizing to thousands of confused, angry, and irritated customers…

Apologies Ranked

Seth Godin’s blog ranks corporate apologies on a 1-10 scale, with #1 being “You can always take your business elsewhere” (ouch) to #10 being “We’re so sorry… we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again… how can we make it up to you?”

It’s a good list, although I think some core elements are missing. Saying you’re sorry isn’t enough. Neither is correcting the problem. You also need to take responsibility and offer concrete next steps to regain the customers’ trust.

Core Elements To A Great Apology

What are the core elements to a great apology?

Sincerely Apologize

So many businesses seem afraid to say “I’m sorry” because they’re afraid of the liability of owning the mistake or of potentially damaging their brands. Maybe that’s a legitimate concern, sometimes. Other times, the best policy is sincerity.

When Amazon removed copies of 1984 by George Orwell from Kindles across the land, there was no hiding it, and people complained. The response from Jeff Bezos was quick and apparently heartfelt:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

This may not allay consumer fears about digital products or satisfy every affected consumer, but the gesture went a long way to assuaging customer opinion.

Explain What Happened

In September, Gmail suffered an hour+ outage. Google posted an entry in the Gmail blog acknowledging the problems and, later, a post explaining what went wrong and what they intend to do about it.

Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation. Here’s what happened…

Acknowledge The Customer’s Feelings

When Apple slashed the price of the iPhone just a few months after it went on sale in 2007, early adopters were irate. Steve Jobs offered a personal note that doesn’t exactly exude warmth, but does acknowledge his customers’ feelings, explain the reality of price cuts in consumer electronics, and promise a $100 store credit to affected early adopters.

Even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Offer Appropriate Compensation

Last month, T-Mobile Sidekick customers suffered a week-long data outage–and, on top of that, potentially lost data stored in “the cloud”. As part of its apology plan, T-Mobile offered affected customers a $50 credit plus a $100 customer appreciation card.

When the Men’s Wearhouse in Portland ran out of stock for a certain item, the manager ordered the item at the sale price on behalf of a customer trying to take advantage of the last day of the sale. When the item failed to arrive on the appointed day, the manager hand-delivered the item to the customer’s house that night, no extra charge.

Sometimes, compensation means money. Sometimes it means blood, sweat, and tears–or, at least mileage.

Promise To Do Better

When wild winter weather helped disrupt JetBlue service, the airline could have apologized for the inconvenience and hid behind the stormfront. Instead, CEO David Neeleman went public with a video apology where he promised to do better–even offering a new, official commitment to customers explaining how JetBlue will handle operational interruptions going forward. They promised to do better, and meant it.

Of course, if you can’t promise to do better, maybe you can make a custom 404 that develops its own cult-like following and eases customer complaints. (Maybe. But not likely.)

And Now… The Rest Of The Story

As we all know, I have a spotty record when it comes to customer apologies. Early last week, I was given a new opportunity apologize to thousands of people affected by a lengthy overnight outage at the product I manage.

Here’s what I said:

We’re deeply sorry and embarrassed about the service interruption many of you experienced last night, into this morning.

Starting at around six o’clock eastern time on October 26, the Gamesville database entered an unstable state. No data was lost, but Gold status was not properly recognized across the site, GV Rewards values were incorrect or missing, and game rooms were no longer available for anyone (free members or Gold members) to play in. Internal monitoring failed to alert us to the situation so the problem persisted into this morning. Once the problem was identified, we immediately began working to fix the problem, and posting messages on the Gamesville Blog to update you on our progress and answer questions. Gamesville was fully functional by nine-thirty this morning, but that’s little comfort to people who wanted to play in the hours before then and couldn’t.

There aren’t words to express how sorry we are for the frustration, concern, and disruption that we caused. At Gamesville, odds are great, you’ll have fun time — relaxing, hanging with friends, winning a prize you’ve always wanted. Last night, we failed to deliver, and that needs to change. That will change.

We are taking immediate actions to regain your confidence. More comprehensive monitoring is being installed to better recognize and alert us to problems, and help mitigate or prevent such outages in the future. We are also working on a more extensive communications plan to provide timely information to you, in a more convenient way. As a result, Gamesville will prove to be more reliable and responsive to you than ever before.

You deserved more than what you got from us last night. Everyone here at Gamesville hopes you’ll give us the chance to welcome you back into our game rooms again and provide you with the positive experiences you’ve come to expect.

If you have any comments or questions about what happened last night, or anything at all, please feel comfortable posting here or contacting me at my personal email address.

Sincerely,
Chris Cummings
Manager, Gamesville.com

I’m hesitant to lump this in with “great business apologies”, but the response to what I said was pretty outstanding–and, for that, I’m deeply appreciative.

I know some of my peers at other companies would probably fob all this off: It’s just games, after all; it’s not like anyone’s lives were actually affected. And that attitude drives me batty.

Between emails and phone calls and social media, we received literally thousands upon thousands of messages about this outage. I listened to those calls, and personally read and responded to the many messages in my in-box. I could feel what my customers were feeling. This service is important to them–more important than even I realized–and we owe it to them to make sure it’s there.

We’re lucky to have a strong community on the site to help us get through events like this. Now, we must live up to the commitments we’ve made to make things better. Despite our–or any business’–best efforts, outages and mistakes will happen from time to time; our job is to make things right, and make sure we prevent those same mistakes from ever happening again.

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Brought to you by the marketing department at Pepsi

Business school didn’t teach me the art and science of how to apologize appropriately and effectively. (That’s something life and server outages have drilled into me.) Judging from some of the corporate apologies we’ve seen recently, we all have a lot still to learn.

Today, we’ll look at three examples of truly terrible ways to apologize. Next time, we’ll discuss the elements of a truly great apology–and see if the major outage we had this week on the product I lead yields any lessons that could benefit product managers who finds themselves in a similar situation.

Outages Happen

As Ben at MailChimp points out, server problems are embarrassing, interruptive, and happen to everybody. The question is, how to properly address them…

Some Truly Terrible Ways To Say, “I’m Sorry”

What makes up a truly terrible apology?

Inappropriate Tone

Hosting service Dreamhost accidentally over-billed nearly all of its customers in early 2008. This made their customers angry. Josh at Dreamhost blogged about the problem once it was uncovered, and provided a very detailed recount of what had happened. But chose a humorous tone in his apology, which–not surprisingly–didn’t sit well with over-billed customers who wanted to be taken seriously.

Hint: Any time you plan to include a picture of Homer Simpson with your apology — that’s a strong indicator that you’re heading for #apologyfail.

Hashtag

Pepsi released an iPhone app recently that helped guys brag about their sexual escapades. When Pepsi was labeled sexist, they pulled the app and tweeted what could be the most embarrassing corporate apology I’ve ever seen:

Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback. #pepsifail

First, they’re using text speak, which is simply an inappropriate language choice–a good apology demands a certain level of respect for the audience. Second, their apology has no empathy–there’s no indication they feel your pain–and lacks even a trace of them taking responsibility for their actions–they didn’t do anything wrong; it’s your fault for not having a sense of humor. Thirdly, they hashtagged their apology.

Nothing says “I’m sorry” better than self-referential metadata.

Empty Actions

Apologizing in person to people you’ve hurt might seem like a tremendous act of contrition…

Unless you’ve essentially swindled millions of dollars out of hard-working students for your business that’s about to declare bankruptcy. If that’s the case, your dogeza apology is going to be rejected because it doesn’t fit the circumstances: These customers don’t want bows, they want their money back.

Next Time

Those are three examples of truly terrible apologies. Have more? Please share them in the comments.

Next time, we’ll discuss the elements of a truly great apology. And see what we can learn from the experience I had apologizing to thousands of confused, angry, and irritated customers earlier this week…

New Around Here?

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To recap: In a desperate bid to escape total annihilation, I activated the Space-Time Energy Projection crystal — which ripped a hole in the fabric of time, sending my team and I back to prehistoric Earth.

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the Rulon flagship latch onto us with a tractor beam, allowing those evil bastards to follow us back to the past, where they immediately enslaved the dinosaurs in an attempt to… to… oh. Wait. That’s Dino-Riders.

Here’s what really happened.

Many Will Enter, Everyone Will Win?

On midnight, December 28. Eights days after launch. Hours after the Lead Developer had departed for Brazil. Bad Things Went Down.

The product (a new sweepstakes platform) revealed its fatal flaw: Instead of selecting one winner from the eligible entries and notifying that lucky person of their win, the system in live service opted to email everyone who entered–thousands, upon thousands of people–and tell everyone they’d won.

The engineering manager caught the error, took the necessary steps to handle the technical side of things and select the one, true winner. But I was left with the rather dark task of telling one person he’d won… and thousands of other people that they hadn’t actually won.

And Then I Made Things Worse

Here’s the text of the email we sent out, breaking the bad news:

Dear [redacted] -

We would like to take this moment to apologize for the email you received from [redacted] on December 28, 2003, titled ‘You won the iPod sweepstakes!’. This email incorrectly identified you as the winner of the iPod in our weekly Rewards sweepstakes. Unfortunately, you are NOT a weekly winner at this time.

We could bore you with the technical reasons for why the sweepstakes was not capable of running as planned. Instead, please rest assured that the issue has been resolved and that the correct winner has been determined and notified.

To apologize for this technical error, we are going to deposit 10,000 bonus Rewards into your [redacted] account. Once these Rewards have been deposited into your account, they are yours to keep or redeem. These bonus Rewards will be deposited in your account by January 15, 2004.

As always, we very much appreciate your patronage … and your feedback. Feel free to contact us any time if you have questions or issues about Rewards or anything.

Sincerely,
The staff of [redacted]

Fortunately, we had a good community of people, and many wrote back, expressing sadness but understanding. Others were really angry–not just at what happened, but at my messaging.

“Please, Bore Us Tiny Folks With The Details!”

Pros of the above email: we addressed every message individually; proactively sent them out within hours of the bug’s discovery; and offered every affected member a form of compensation.

However–the phrase “We could bore you with the technical reasons” struck a strong, strong chord with some folks. My attempt to defuse, instead, incited people. Made them feel like they were being belittled, insulted.

“Please, bore us tiny folks with the details!” (and various variations) flooded our in-box.

I was horrified. But there was nothing further to do. The emails were out and could not be rescinded.

To a much lesser degree–people also took issue with the message coming from the amorphous “staff” rather than an individual. Upon reflection, that was really lame: My name should have been on it.

Lessons Learned

Within a few weeks, the issue had evaporated. No other customer blowback. No protracted legal or PR issues. No board of inquiry.

But the experience definitely changed how I viewed my job, my products, and my way of interacting with customers.

My own core set of rules started to develop…

• Never launch a major initiative a week prior to your lead developer going on vacation;
• When you apologize for a mistake, don’t try to lighten the mood;
• Being “online” is not a “Get out of jail free” card;
• Consider both the potential value of the release to your customers as well as the potential harm buggy software might inflict on them and your reputation;
• Don’t let internal politics over-rule your common sense.

In hindsight, these are all pretty obvious. But, at that time, there was no one to teach me such things–and the incredible pressure of internal politics, of the sand shifting beneath my feet, convinced me to leap when calmer heads should have prevailed.

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Everyone does or says the wrong thing from time to time.

It’s true for Cap, and it’s true for me. Gather ’round, everyone–while I share with you The Biggest Professional Mistake I Ever Made, and what you can learn from it.

Picture It: Waltham, Massachusetts.
December 2003

An olive-skinned Product Manager prepares to launch an Exciting New Product. ENP has been tested, it’s ready to go. But the situation, internally, is less than ideal.

For one, his parent company is in turmoil, and resources from every division (including his) are being reallocated to The New Corporate Initiative.

For another, the lead developer on ENP is about to go on vacation for six weeks in South America.

The Product Manager needs to decide… do we release Exciting New Product now, a few days before Lead Developer departs so he can deal with any issues that crop up–or wait until Lead Developer returns six weeks later, not knowing if the company will still support the product and allow ENP to launch upon his return to the States?

I Made My Choice

No surprise (given the title of this post)… the olive-skinned Product Manager in this story is me.

And I decided to go for it.

After all, it’s the web, right? We’re not printing and shipping discs. If something goes wrong, just patch it or shut it down.

Unfortunately, something did go wrong.

On midnight, December 28.

Eight days after launch, and just hours after Lead Developer boarded a plane for Brazil. Even worse, what happened wasn’t something that could just be patched, and it literally affected thousands of people.

Tomorrow…

We’ll look at what happened–and how my attempt to correct the situation made things worse.

New Around Here?

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