Tired employees are updating shipping orders late at night at a textbook brokerage firm. They make a mistake in their code and accidentally ship an outdated management textbook to an important customer. Three days later, classes have started, but the course load is high and students are already feeling late. A lot of people are looking for replacements right away. Queue angry calls and emails.
Thankfully it works teeth Damage received can be repaired. In fact, if you handle this delicate situation well, the company may really come out. first is a phenomenon known as Paradox of Service Recovery.
The service recovery paradox is that a customer who has experienced a problem with a product or service but whose problem has been effectively resolved has a better impression of the company than a customer who has never experienced the problem. It is a phenomenon that there is a high possibility that Fundamentally, if a business can recover effectively from a service failure, customer satisfaction can actually be better than if the failure never occurred.
How can your company capitalize on this paradox? It all depends on the apology message and how the apology process is documented, recorded and shared with internal and external stakeholders.
How to create an apology message
1. Recover lost value.
Your customer believes this issue has upset the balance of “fairness”. They want to know what you’re going to do to regain the lost perception of value. Offer to remedy the situation to ensure the customer’s attention and trust. Without leading this step, the rest of the message has little effect.
In the context of textbooks, examples include sending additional resources related to books that provide additional learning value. Perhaps there are videos, simulations, or other materials that enhance the learning experience that schools and students are not paying for. The key is to offer high value and low cost to the customer.
2. Accept liability.
This doesn’t have to be overly complicated, but it’s important to distinguish between making excuses for what happened and accepting responsibility for mistakes.
Blaming another entity, such as a supplier or distributor, after an example of a coding mistake creates mistrust and derails an apology. Your message must clearly state that you take full responsibility for ensuring that the matter is resolved in their best interests. It is about regaining full confidence and trust in It also takes proactive and preventative measures to protect against further problems.
3. Describe your problem.
Customers want to know that they’ve pinpointed the problem and its root cause. This increases your confidence that the proposed fix will protect you from reoccurring the same problem.
In the above case, the textbook broker should explain that even though the code always worked, it was referencing an old set of tables in the company’s database due to a manual coding error. You can admit your mistakes. I also told the customer that I was creating multiple safeguards tailored to their specific issue in order to resolve the issue, so my apology was more likely to be accepted.
4. Describe how to fix the problem.
This step describes specifically how you fixed the problem and describes the steps you have taken to prevent the problem from reoccurring.
In a textbook example, this might include performing random audits of shipping orders to ensure additional manual verification, and creating redundancies in coding software to further check orders. I have. Or two older, it could be a mistake and needs special attention. It may also involve changing processes so that updates are not performed during peak busy periods.
5. We express our regret.
The actual expression of regret (the “I’m sorry” part) works best after the above concerns have been fully addressed. Expressions of regret are even more sincere because they are backed up by many actions. Customers respond better to a sincere apology. Be aware of the impact, because it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that your customer’s business has been harmed.
In a textbook example, a broker should say: We hope you can see and feel our commitment to maintaining the trust and confidence of our customers. I apologize to both your company and your customers. ”
Statements of this kind convey genuine regret and sincerity while also emphasizing that the issue has been resolved.
sample apology message
Here’s an example of an apology message to use as a guide. In this case, a company is apologizing to its customers for a software outage during its busiest period. It covers all the important parts you want to include in your apology message.
We want to fix any issues this outage may have caused you, your team, or your employees. First, I was approved to provide your company with a one-month refund. This is twice his length of your benefit enrollment period. This is an extended reimbursement, recognizing that it occurred during peak times for your company. We also instructed our customer service team to manually check all sign-ups that occurred after the software was back online to ensure they were accurately captured. We will let you know the results as soon as they are completed within a week.
Software outages are entirely our fault. At such a critical time for your business, much less should it have happened. We take full responsibility and promise to make sure this never happens again.
We deeply regret that such an outage has occurred and our team is making the necessary changes to prevent a recurrence. Our outage should have been booked for planned downtime with prior communication and we regret failing on both accounts in this situation.
Just to let you know what happened, your software went down after a massive power outage in one of our data centers. Customer workloads were transferred to other data centers as part of backup plans and service agreements. However, the second center where the content was assigned was down for preventive maintenance and hardware updates. This brought the system down for a period of time as it reconfigured to find the next alternative for the workload. We’ve updated our redundancy system to prevent this from happening in the future.
We are very sorry for this outage. As soon as I found out about this, I was in touch with the tech team until it was resolved. On behalf of our company, we would like to apologize not only to you, but to your leadership team and all affected employees.
Document, commemorate, and share your apology process
It is important to clearly document your efforts to apologize to the customer. That way, if someone makes another mistake in the future, the company can look to an objective framework to craft a new apology message. Avoid what went wrong and be better prepared for future service failures.
The apology process should also be shared and shown to external stakeholders. This phenomenon, known as straddle the boundary, important to the service recovery paradox. Because it not only shows vulnerability from the organization, but also shows other customers that the company can be counted on in times of distress.
Businesses always make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you craft your apology message and take great care to execute it properly can make the difference between losing those customers and increasing loyalty.