As a business owner/leader you should always look for ways to positively reinforce your culture.

I ran across a recent issue of Business Week which noted a study by the Nottingham School of Economics on apologies versus cash incentives.  In the study, researchers contacted customers who’d filed online complaints about a German wholesaler.  They offered a cash incentive to half the unhappy customers if they would remove their complaint.  To the other half, they offered a short apology and requested they remove their complaints.  Amazingly, 45% of the customers receiving an apology removed their complaints, compared to only 21% of the customers offered cash.

I thought this was a great point and took a minute to comment on it for our staff at Conditioned Air Solutions, partly because it reinforced our philosophy on saying we’re sorry when we mess up.

Do I think we have a problem with regard to this?  No, I really don’t.  Do I think if I don’t reinforce the critical parts of our culture whenever I see an opportunity, we’ll eventually lose track of why things like this are important, and won’t naturally handle each situation the right way?  You bet I do.

I attached a scan of the article to the email to our staff and pointed out how true I thought it was and included a couple of examples of experiences I’d recently had personally.

This example was about how we have to make a judgment call on how to handle each of our mistakes.  Unless you run a fairly small company, you can’t make each decision for each customer interaction.  But as the founder or owner, you want those decisions to be in line with your intentions.  The way to make that happen is to train your people in the way you want it done and then look for opportunities to reinforce that training.

Bad customer service has always been a hot button of mine.  Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but it seems like it has recently spiraled out of control.  Poor service, poor attitude, poor manners – people screw up all the time and don’t even have the courtesy to say they are sorry.

Don’t let your employees do this!  Teach them to use the two simple words “I’m sorry!” – and mean them!  This will make a big difference in how your customers deal with your mistakes.  It’s pretty simple really:

If you forget to call someone back, just say you are sorry!

If you take too long to do something, just say you are sorry!

If you totally ruin someone’s house and they have to stay in a hotel for a week while you repair it, just (really, really, really) say you are sorry

If a customer sends you an email and you don’t see it for a week, jump on it immediately, and just say you are sorry.  Don’t pretend you didn’t make the mistake, and don’t think that because they don’t rake you over the coals it must not have meant anything to them; I assure you it did.

I’m amazed at how people forget to return my call, don’t deliver something they promised, or take three times longer than their estimate, but don’t bother to say “I’m sorry!”  If delivered from the heart, these are just flat out magic words. I find they quench the fire of my frustration nearly every time.

At Conditioned Air, we encourage our people to bend over backwards to give any non-abusive, honest customer the benefit of the doubt, often accompanied by those magic words.  And then we make it right (how we do that obviously depends on the situation).  You should do the same: encourage your people to admit their mistakes to your customers and then fix them.

Ah, you say, but what about abusive, nasty, mean-spirited customers? Well, if you messed up, say you are sorry.  And if they really are abusive, stop doing business with them.  You can’t control their attitude, only your own.

Of course, being sorry isn’t enough in and of itself.  If you screw up constantly, you are going to have a hard time keeping customers no matter how much you apologize (I doubt it would make much difference in Ryan’s breakfast example from the other day).  But if you deliver a decent product or service, a little humility and the appropriate apology will do wonders for your customer relationships.