A Genuine Apology Goes a Long Way

Ben Cohen reports today in the Wall Street Journal about a remarkable apology email issued by Andrew Benin, chief executive of Graza, a startup that sells squeezable bottles of extra-virgin olive oil.  Unfortunately, the company did not cope effectively with high customer demand during the holidays.  Many people received their packages late, and some packages were damaged.  Customers complained of leaking olive oil bottles.  Cohen drafted a detailed apology and sent it to over 35,000 Graza customers.  Cohen described the rather unconventional email:

The mea culpa from a one-year-old company with the subject line “Learning from our mistakes” was just about the opposite of a typical corporate response. It explained in plain English and candid detail what went wrong and why. It took accountability for those errors and offered a discount on future orders. It was raw, transparent about uncertainty and messy with typos and misspellings. It was also oddly entertaining and strangely charming.

You can read the entire email for yourself if you view Cohen's article on the Wall Street Journal website.  Like Cohen, I found the apology very genuine and sincere, and it didn't feel as robotic as many corporate apology emails do (I could do without the spelling and grammatical errors though. I am a professor after all).  In Cohen's article, he cites author Marjorie Ingall's advice for issuing apologies.  

1. Say you’re sorry.

2. For what you did.

3. Show you understand why it was bad.

4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses.

5. Say why it won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it.

The six recommendations seems sensible.  However, the real reason for the effectiveness of the Graza email seems to be in the tone, not just the content itself.  You can do the six things above, and yet you may still write a robotic email that sounds inauthentic.  Did this email work? Well, 867 people actually replied to the email, many quite positively. One said, “Thanks for your honesty. I wish more businesses did the same.”

Apologizing for a Mistake at Work

Source:  Pixabay

We often hear about the importance of ackowledging failures and mistakes at work, and then learning from them.   Instead, of course, we often see people trying to make excuses or even hiding mistakes to avoid blame or finger-pointing.   Fear drives out opportunities for relationship-mending and learning in many instances.   How, though, should we apologize for a mistake that we have made at work?  What are the elements of an effective apology?   Some research by Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin, and Robert Lount Jr. sheds light on this issue.  

Lewicki and his colleagues have identified six components of an apology.  These components are:

• expression of regret
• explanation
• acknowledgement of responsibility
• declaration of repentance
• offer of repair
• request for forgiveness

Their experimental research has shed light on the structure of the most effective apologies.  First, and not surprisingly, they find that an apology consisting of more of these components is more efficacious than an apology containing fewer elements.   Second, they examined which elements were most important.   Lewicki and his colleagues find that an acknowledgement of responsibilty is the most critical component.   The second most important element is an offer to repair the damage. The third most critical feature of an apology is an explanation of the error.  

J.C. Penney Apologizes. Now What?

J.C. Penney has issued a new advertisement apologizing to its customers for the mistakes that the firm made during the past year or so.   I have to commend the move.  It takes guts to come out with such a commercial, acknowledging serious merchandising/pricing errors.  However, customers needed to hear this message.  Moreover, the message is strong and effective not simply because of the apology, but because it includes an explicit invitation for customers to return.  What else is needed?  J.C. Penney needs to follow up this ad by explaining to customers what has changed.  What did they learn from these mistakes?  How have they rectified past errors?  What will be different when customers return?  The firm has to answer these questions to overcome the hesitation that some customers will have about returning to the stores.  

What Does a Business Apology Mean in Different Cultures?

Yesterday, I taught my case on BP and the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill here in Tokyo.   We had a very interesting discussion regarding BP's actions both before the accident and in the immediate aftermath.  Some Japanese executives felt that BP CEO Tony Hayward should have put forth a clearer, more direct apology immediately. Others were not so sure, pointing out that the US is a highly litigious society.

I brought up a study by Insead's William Maddux which he conducted along with Tetsushi Okumura of Japan's Nagoya City University as well as USC's Peter Kim and Northwestern's Jeanne Brett.  They have studied the meaning and function of apologies across cultures.   They found a difference between what they call "individual-agency cultures" such as the US and "collective" cultures such as Japan.  In the US, an apology means that one is taking the blame for a failure.  On the other hand, in Japan, apologies are "general expressions of remorse rather than a means to assign culpability."   Perhaps because of this difference in meaning, they found that the Japanese tend to apologize more often, even if they were not at fault for particular actions.  The findings definitely resonated with the Japanese executives with whom I discussed the BP case yesterday.   They acknowledged that apologies do take on a different meaning in their country.  As executives work and do business in different countries, they would be well-served to understand these key differences. 

Amazon Apologizes for Lady Gaga Error

Amazon moved quickly this week to rectify the problem that hindered customers from taking advantage of a terrific deal on the new Lady Gaga album.   On Monday, when Amazon offered Lady Gaga's new album for only 99 cents, customers rushed to download it.  The incredible demand overwhelmed Amazon's systems.  To their credit, Amazon apologized for the error, fixed the problem, and then brought the offer back to its customers on Thursday.   The company deserves credit for learning from its less effective response to its cloud service difficulties just a few weeks ago, when it was slow to acknowledge the problem and apologize to customers.  

The story offers a few key lessons for managers. First, learning from your stumbles and translating that learning into immediate improvement can have a powerful positive effect.  In addition, when you do make a mistake, you have to do three things.  First, you have to acknowledge your error publicly.  Second, you have to fix the problem.  Finally, you have to remedy the situation with your customers when you are sure that you are able to serve them effectively.    Too many companies either are too slow to admit their mistakes, or they rush to make it up to customers when they still aren't ready to offer an exceptional service experience.  Amazon took a couple days to get the problem ironed out before coming back to its customers with the deal on Thursday.