Does Sorry Mean Less than You Imagine?

Inevitably, when dealing with customers, something goes wrong. When I had to get my mountain bike’s gears serviced at the local shop – I’d tried but got nowhere – all seemed well.

But a couple of days after getting the bike back something went ping and I was left with only the smallest front cog available. For those who don’t ride a bike, this meant that my legs had to whiz around like those of Olympic sprint cyclist, but my forward progress was something less than walking pace.

I returned to the shop and explained the problem. The repairman and I then had a debate over whose fault it was: I was fairly sure that I had done the damage when trying to adjust the gears myself, whereas he maintained that he had a slight tendency to over tighten the screw that had sheared off. We both agreed that the manufacturer had sacrificed too much strength to make it light. He apologised and generously repaired the bike for free; great customer service.

It probably helped the impact of his apology that I had not gone into the situation expecting one. Researchers led by a Dutch psychologist designed an experiment to compare the impact of real apologies with those people imagined.

In the test people were playing a game with an unseen partner. They could give up to ten euros to the other person, at which point the money was tripled and that person could choose to give back as much or as little as they chose. In each case the person gave back a rather measly five euros.

The original participant was then either given an actual apology from the other person, or else told to imagine that the other person had apologised to them.

The researchers discovered that those people who imagined an apology valued it more highly than the people who actually received one. Comparing the two groups it would seem that apologies are worth less than we imagine.

Why might this be the case and why should you be careful about how interpret this in customer service situations?

I suspect this happened because, in imagining an apology, participants were doing what people usually do in market research, idealising. If you’re designing your own apology, you’re likely to pinpoint exactly the issue that has aggrieved you – you’ll be apologising (to yourself) in the right way for the right thing.

[Customer Service Tip: This is one of the reasons that, if you’re ever looking to take the wind out of someone’s sales when they’re complaining about something that can’t now be rectified, you can simply ask, “What would you like me to do about it” and then do whatever they ask: this encourages them to realise there is relatively little that can actually be done, and makes them venting their fury seem a little futile.]

One could easily deduce from this study, as indeed the authors of the report do, that someone needs to do more than simply apologise if they want the other person to be happy. However, I believe that would be a mistake for two reasons.

Firstly, we don’t normally approach a situation with a clear idea of the apology we want. In the absence of our expectations finding that someone is conciliatory may be a pleasant surprise and therefore there is no idealised benchmark against which it must compete.

Secondly, I have previously reported on a large behavioural study that found people were more likely to withdraw negative feedback on EBay when they received an apology than when they received compensation (link).

One thing that’s clear; apologies are important. Good customer service isn’t just about getting things right. It’s also about how you handle it when things go wrong.

Source: D. De Cremer, M. M. Pillutla, C. R. Folmer. How Important Is an Apology to You?: Forecasting Errors in Evaluating the Value of Apologies. Psychological Science, 2010; 22 (1): 45 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610391101

Image courtesy: Kristina Alexanderson