Sorry Not Sorry: A case study on organizational apologizinga
Be better than DataCat
DataCat (not it’s real name) is a small B2B database company with a global footprint of 500 clients, suffers approximately ten and twenty self-generated critical incidents per year. Examples include: data breaches, credit card processing malfunctions and security issues, and software coding errors that result in system malfunction. Four-to-five hundred less urgent incidents are logged each year. These range from needed feature requests to slow performance to personnel issues to customization refusals. Management says that if the user can accomplish any work at all on the system, the issue is non-critical, an attitude clients and tech support disagrees with. Although incidents are common, management reacts as if each is a unique surprise, an attitude that gets old fast for employees and clients. Clients pay an average of $175 per hour for customer support by the hour or monthly subscription. Lacking in-house customer service training or a system for delivering an effective apology, incidents result in blame shifting and communication avoidance, which magnifies the issue and leads to employee apathy and loss of morale. Quite honestly, the firm’s success has depended on two things: an aggressive sales department, and an industry segment with very little competition. DataCat’s products are advertised to have functionalities like calendaring that never worked, yet are still bundled into the database package. Tech support is called to do the same fix over and over. Sales, support, and programming departments are not allowed to talk to one another. The programming department hates the faulty products, and, as human nature works, only wants to work on fresh, interesting projects. In any case, no time is built into their production schedule to accommodate reworking the faulty coding. The original creators have long since left the company. For some functionalities, tech support is instructed to tell the paying customers to “just turn that feature off.” Some crises have been the result of poor oversight. Two years ago DataCat experienced a major data failure—not as a result of hacking, but careless data frameworks. For example, a member of the public filling out an online database form found that the URL address ended in his surname. He amended the URL with another name and gained immediate access to someone else’s data. This prompted a major meltdown. The programmers worked frantically to correct the problem, and while DataCat apologized to the one client (throwing it’s own programmers under the bus), it did not notify or apologize to any of the other clients. More tellingly, it did not put any procedure in place to avoid the same kind of error in the future. DataCat just hoped nobody noticed. The apology has only been seriously examined in the last thirty years. Experts from the fields of psychology, economics, public relations, ethics, and legal studies have all weighed in, but they all agree that reputation is at the center of the apology, and that an attempt to rebuild trust after a violation is required. Social norms demand an apology to enable trust, good reputation and customer loyalty, and a lack of an apology can be costly. Different researchers have devised lists of what constitutes an effective corporate apology. In a study for theJournal of Business Ethicsof customer and employee views of reputation in the financial sector, Carola Hillenbrand suggested six attributes of corporate responsibility: transparency, integrity, minimisation, non-financial purpose, competence, and continuity. Minimisation in this context refers to minimising violations, non-financial purpose refers to the business at least adhering to law and continuity is the faith that the business can survive a violation. Timeliness is a factor, and one that might necessitate a two-part apology: one that states that the matter is under investigation, and a second to follow up. For a true resolution, certain things must communicated: that the specific act happened, which acknowledges legitimacy; regret, or admitting fault; compensation; non-repetition; and amends for the future. All the literature agrees that the concepts “authenticity” “concern” and “regret” are important, but the three essential components of an effective apology, whether personal, communal or corporate are these:
- Admit fault and be specific
- Express regret and sympathy for the violation
- State in concrete ways that the violation will not be repeated, and follow through
In addition, companies beware: a poor apology is worse than none. Pseudoapologies like “We’re sorry you feel that way,” or ‘“Mistakes were made.” Politicians and powerful companies do this all the time, and it makes them sound like jerks. DataCat has a variety of events it needs to learn how to apologize for, and it needs to fully learn that an apology missing any of the three steps is a fail. Doing it right saves money: medical malpractice survey research suggests that victims desire apologies, and that some victims would have forgone litigation if the hospital had offered an apology. Michael B. Runnels, in an issue of the Seattle University Law review found that medical victims seek an apology, and that some victims would not have sued, if only the hospital had offered an one. States with laws that encourage physical apologies have seen lawsuits and payout amounts decrease. There are concrete steps DataCat can take to create a better apology structure, as well as help mitigate the need for it. It can create a team with that has authority, with members from different areas of the organization. The good news is that once the staff is trained and the procedure is well-documented, the team can ultimately put itself out of business. Of course, the poor framework needs to be addressed primarily by the programming team, which must build a more diverse and robust testing system, and the management team, which must develop a more realistic time scale and benchmarking system. In any event, even if the causes are minimized, human error will eventually lead to the next breach, so Datacat needs to create a apology procedure, put it somewhere easily found, and train staff to follow it. US apology = admission of wrong Japan apology = repairing the reputation Every child knows that an apology is necessary to resolve a dispute, but many of the tools were developed by Aristotle a millenia and a half ago. Rhetoric can assist a company to develop responsive, sincere apologies that avoid confusion and convey sincerity. Tone and formality can be assessed, as well as setting and the status of the apologiser. In rhetoric, the goal, or “telos” of an apology is to repair trust between the harmed and the violator, and not, as cynics believe, image restoration. A genuine apology requires fulfilling the telos. This sincerity, this genuineness must be aspired to, even if those offended refuse to accept the apology. A who-what-where-when-why can be anticipated and planned for. For serious issues, it is appropriate that top management, or a delegate with a title relevant to the formality of the apology be the deliverer, and the apology should be delivered to client staff that have been negatively impacted by the error, such as a front-line manager who had to calm a furious member of the public. Everyone handling the client as the case escalates should be encouraged to express that they are sorry. The “what” must be as specific about the problem as possible, in this case that the encryption of the URL was incomplete, and unnoticed upon release. The location of the apology for this type of crisis can be the phone, but in-person or videoconferencing would be optimal. Email is completely inadequate, except as a carefully crafted notice to the other clients. “When” is a little trickier, because as events unfold, it can be hard to tell exactly what is happening, and specificity is fundamental in an apology. So an apology with an investigatory narrative can be delivered, perhaps from management level, as long blame is not diverted to lower-level employees. Southwest Airlines had a fatal accident in April 2018. The airline immediately released a genuine apology for the tragedy, noting that the causes would take some time to assess, but that they would keep the public informed, which they did. It may be tempting to address the “why” as merely public relations image repair, but as we know from Aristotle, it should be done because it is the right thing to do. A more concerning non-critical issue is that of staff antipathy. There have been clients who create a bottleneck in the case assignment process because they refuse to work with certain employees who have treated them rudely in the past. In many companies this would be grounds for dismissal, however at DataCat, it is tolerated because the most common target of complaint is the Head of Client Services, who is second in command of the company. Unfortunately, she serves as the main figure to conduct apologies, a task she both dislikes and avoids. If the company wishes to develop effective procedures, some diplomacy will be required. First, the Head of Client Services should never be in the line of normal working with any client, no matter how important, but she should continue being valued for the contributions she does accomplish well. Second, the company should stress to the CEO the importance of making apologies for crisis situations himself, and deputize another member of upper management, one with good soft skills, to speak for the company for lesser, but still important apologies. The marketing and communication manager could contribute meaningfully in this area. Winter is a slow time for much of the tech support division of DataCat, due to the cyclical nature of its clients. The company is already paying employees whose call levels are reduced to about 50% of the rest of the year. Empowering this department to take the lead on creating and implementing an apology protocol is already in alignment with their skills, and would promote better morale and engagement in their work. Lastly, DataCat needs to provide clear training and directions to the staff on the front lines, who are too often the pinch position between angry clients and avoidance-seeking management. Gregory Ciotti at Helpspot.com says, “Apologies are necessary when dealing with upset customers, but if there isn’t a system in place to learn from this feedback, you’re just putting your support team on the receiving end of complaints with no means to fix the root of the problem…Without any sort of authority, a support team just becomes a lifeless punching bag. It’s bad for customers because it’s like talking to a brick wall, but it’s bad for your team as well.”
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