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?

Subscribe to the feed to receive future updates; follow me on Twitter to keep the discussion going!

The G.I. Joe code-named Snake-Eyes is the definition of the strong, silent type: His mask covers his hideously scarred face, and his damaged vocal chords prevent him from speaking. His actions, though, speak volumes.

While you probably don’t have masked ninjas with pet wolves skulking around your office, you probably do interact with many different personality types during the day.

As a product manager, it’s your job to be fluent in the “languages” spoken by the people around you–to hear what they say, and what they don’t say.

People are complicated and dynamic, and sometimes it’s difficult to understand their motives and actions. As a product manager, you Get Things Done through other people. So if you don’t “get” them, you aren’t getting anywhere.

For example, suppose you’re creating a new mobile phone. As a product manager, you must be able to…

• Translate high concepts (“multi-point gesture”) into features and requirements for engineering (“interface responds to strokes, twists and pinches of more than one finger, controlling virtual scroll-wheels and zooming intuitively”).
• Translate that functionality into concrete end-user benefits for marketing (“visually stunning, incredibly responsive, makes communication simpler & more fun”).
• And keep your ear to the target market so you know what they want, but have enough of an imagination to be a few steps ahead of them so you aren’t creating products that are out of date by the time they launch.

Layer different personality types on top, and the challenge gets really complex, really fast. So what’s a product manager to do?

First, understand who you’re dealing with. Include yourself in this evaluation.

I know many product managers who prefer communications via email because they like the idea of a virtual paper trail. All well and good–but suppose one or more of the people you’re interacting with are extroverts who thrive on interpersonal communication?

If you don’t give them the personal contact they’re looking for, you’re risking your product flying off the rails–and also missing a tremendous opportunity to forge a relationship that could pay dividends now and in the future.

Still want that virtual paper trail? Discuss face to face, then put it in writing as a summary email. Everyone wins.

Second, adjust your communication styles as needed.

Suppose your team is composed of two or more different personality types, extroverts and introverts–what do you do? You adjust.

For the outgoing folks, make sure you solicit their feedback and involve them in group work such as brainstorms.

For the quieter types, give them the breathing room necessary to execute their work on their own, but make sure their voice is represented in the product.

If you notice someone is very shy about speaking “on the spot” in meetings, for example, provide an agenda ahead of time so everyone has time to research the issue and compose their thoughts. (This approach could even help the folks who talk first, and think later.)

Is this “double” the work? No. This is your job. Do it.

Third, review your successes and make adjustments.

People are mercurial–influenced by their surroundings, their peers, their home life, even you. Pay attention to them. Listen to what they’re telling you. Observe.

The tactics that worked yesterday may not work today because their situation has changed.

Again, it’s your job to be aware and to adjust your approach to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to cut through the noise and make sure communication is happening routinely and effectively.

If all else fails, consider adopting that pet wolf.

Additional Resources

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• Big Five personality traits
• Practical tips to improve communication leveraging the MBTI
• Who I Am = What You Say
• Signal Patterns Personality Test
• Online Personality Test

What kind of communication issues do you encounter in your organization? How do you manage them?

communication | product management