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.