‘I’m so sorry. This is my fault. It’s nothing to do with the company, it’s on me. I got distracted. I’m sorry for the delay it’s caused you’
I was nearly speechless.
‘Ok… well, thank you for saying that. I’ll just get some lunch then get the next one’
We should probably rewind a bit.
Apologies are a rare thing nowadays. A symptom of the broken-down relationship between companies and their customers, organisations tend to avoid ownership, for fear of compensation, litigation, or online humiliation.
Instead, we get one of three things: A refusal to accept blame; a recommendation to complain; or a non-apology apology - an apology for the incident happening, for the impact it’s had, but not for the act itself.
I’ve been an Evernote customer for twelve years. This year, they put my price up 150%. They didn’t tell me this was happening. When I wrote and suggested that this might not be a great experience, they were pretty bolshy about it.
‘Well, you don’t have to pay. That’s your choice. If you’d like to cancel, I’ve included the details at the bottom of the email’
When I called my car insurer to ask about an update on a claim that was outstanding, I didn’t get an answer. But I did get an action for my to-do list
‘You should have received a call back. Let me raise a complaint for you. That way it’ll be recorded that you were unhappy’
I stressed I really didn’t want a complaint, just an update
‘No no, it’s ok, I’ll register the complaint for you, you should have had a call back’
And when my train home from London was delayed and the connecting train wasn’t held, leaving 50 of us waiting an hour for the next train home, the station staff in charge were very clear on what needed to happen next:
‘Go and scan that QR code. You can complain there and will get much more traction than complaining to me’
Which is why, when the same thing happened a week later, I was taken aback by the actual, genuine, humble apology.
It’s fair to say I was pretty angry. Tired, stressed, and with a real need to get home on time. So, the connecting train not being held, again, was almost straw-breaking territory.
As I went to complain, the chap in charge the departures came out of the control room to speak to me.
‘I’m so sorry. This is my fault. It’s nothing to do with the company, it’s on me. I got distracted. I’m sorry for the delay it’s caused you’
What else can you do in that situation? He’s owned up, explained the mistake, and is clearly, truly sorry. It immediately diffused my anger. Because deep down, I suspect my anger was less about the train delay, and more the feeling that they just didn’t care about the train delay.
With this one apology, in that few seconds, he showed me he did.
We all make mistakes, don’t we?
As I was about to hit ‘publish’ on this article, I came across a short video of Adam Grant in conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.
In it, they discuss the power of apology. Gladwell argues that it’s a wonderfully important thing to do. And Grant agrees – with one caveat.
It turns out that we’ll readily accept an apology for a failure of capability - where someone has made a mistake, screwed up, not done something they should have, because they didn’t know how to do it.
It turns out that where it’s a failure of character, we won’t. In those situations, only a change in behaviour will do.
Otherwise, we believe they’ll just do it again.