No More Nonpologies: Apologize to Customers Like You Mean It

HDI Team
HDI Team
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

There are about one thousand varieties of insincere apology. There’s the smirking “Sorry if you were offended” apology which blames the person you insulted. There’s the oblique, passive voice “Mistakes were made” apology that admits nothing. Nothing! And there’s the undercutting “If I did something wrong, I’m sorry” apology that doesn’t even accept that something worth being sorry for actually happened.

If you are an otherwise sincere person, your close relationships can probably survive a handful of insincere apologies. Saying “Sorry, Not Sorry” a few times won’t make your mom or your spouse write you off. But when you work in customer support, an insincere apology can really backfire. It can make an angry customer angrier. A “nonpology” can squander the rapport you have worked so hard to build with your customers.

Sometimes, when things go wrong, when you are to blame for a problem, or when a customer is rightfully aggrieved, all you can offer is an apology, so you really must learn to do it right. Here are three tips for writing a heartfelt apology to a customer.

Tip 1: Stop Writing, “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused…”

Let’s say you work in customer support for a cable service provider we’ll call ComFinity. A customer, Susan, uses live chat (at her office) to let you know that her cable at home hasn’t been working since the thunderstorm two days ago, and she’s upset because she missed the season finale of her favorite show, The Voice.

A typical response from the support analyst, David, might go like this:

Hello Susan. Thank you for contacting ComFinity Live Chat Support. My name is David. Please give me one moment to review your information. I regret any inconvenience this outage may have caused you, but I’ll be more than happy to resolve it for you…

Stop right there! Don’t write an apology like, “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused…” First, “may have” sounds antagonistic. Clearly, this event did cause inconvenience; there’s no “may have” about it. Second, “any” is generic. ComFinity knows what kind of inconvenience is involved when a customer misses a favorite show. Third, we would never say this to a customer in person. If you would never say something to a customer face-to-face, don’t write it. If Susan were complaining about slow response to an outage to a ComFinity employee in the store, that employee would never look Susan in the eye and say, “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused…” so ComFinity should avoid this wording in its chats and emails.

What should you write instead of, “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused…”? One reliable strategy is to name the inconvenience and admit that it happened. Here’s a revised version of the ComFinity response to Susan:

Thank you for contacting us about the outage. We’re really sorry about the inconvenience of missing the season finale of The Voice. We would like to do some troubleshooting to solve the problem. Do you have time to do that now or would later this evening work better?

[Read the full story for more tips] by Leslie O’Flahavan

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HDI Team
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