Economies of Sorry
tl;dr Some guy hit my car and was completely unapologetic. Major stress would have been avoided if he had just manned up and said he was sorry, now it’s all insurance agencies and extra work. And it got me thinking…
How much does a sorry cost?
That title is in fact a little misleading, it should probably be, how much can a sorry save. In a stressful situation, apologizing has the power to completely obliterate said stress. It’s a subtle thing and can’t be done insincerely.
In business the ROI of disarming a potentially pissed-off customer is probably so great as, if done correctly, the resulting exchange will be conducted in a goal oriented, constructive manner since the emotional part of the exchange has already been satisfied.
The guys at Contrast are (or were now, as they just shut their doors to work full-time on @intercom) experts in this sort of communication. I know one of the engineers that built Exceptional, and when browsing through the help issues in their help desk software, I noticed that many of the exchanges began with an Exceptional representative genuinely apologizing that the problem occurred.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’ think this was simply standard operating policy. Contrast and my engineer friend have always cared about building great stuff, and they genuinely cared about fixing problems. They know the real value of a satisfied customer. That’s why they are focussing heavily on just that with Intercom having just raised a million dollars in funding from high profile investors including Twitter founders.
The proof of the pudding though is action. You can’t apologize about a problem and then do nothing or put it on the long finger. Nothing speaks louder than action at this stage.
Preemptive apology
This is something that I’ve been using for a few years now in Berlin. I’ve learned it through trial and error while dealing with any large company or bureaucratic agency. Since my spoken German and my accent itself could be at times difficult to understand, I would oftentimes find myself having a conversation with someone who just had no inclination to deal with me. I found that if I apologized fairly profusely about the state of my German up-front, and ask for some patience in dealing with me, suddenly the person at the other end of the line was my best friend, willing to help me out in any way … brilliant! It’s slightly dishonest as I’m not that sorry about my German, it’s not all that bad in fact, but the payoff for the preemptive apology is too much to pass up.
