American Customer Service Means Never Saying You’re Sorry
Lose the Bullshit Spin, Just Say You’re Sorry
Years ago in a previous life, I went shopping for new car insurance. Got a preliminary quote from a reputable American company that was cheaper than my incumbent insurer. So I decided to make the switch.
Fast-forward a couple of weeks when my aspiring new agent informed me that my premium was going up because, according to their underwriters, my traffic abstract indicated “two recent speeding tickets,” the last one a year prior, the previous one three months before that.
This was news to me. I clearly remembered getting one ticket but couldn’t for the life of me recall two. My initial reaction was to question my sanity. Was I getting so forgetful in my old age that I wouldn’t remember a speeding ticket? I racked my brain but was drawing blanks.
In a mild panic, I shot an email back to the agent asking for confirmation that the abstract was correct. Without checking, he assured me that the underwriters were “very accurate with their research,” and that I must have forgotten.
I’m embarrassed to admit that he almost convinced me I was going senile. And I probably would’ve let the whole thing slide had I not glimpsed the revised quote showing an 80% increase in my premiums!
Needless to say, this was enough to make me reconsider both my premature-senility theory and decision to switch insurance carriers.
Turns out the first speeding ticket was issued on October 16th 2012, the second on January 1st 2013. So I pulled out my trusty checkbook ledger and quickly found a record of payment to the Hawaii County Court for the first violation, case number and all.
So far so good.
But the January-1st ticket was bugging me. One, because I would’ve absolutely remembered getting a speeding ticket on New Year’s Day, and two, there was no record of me ever having paid it. So either the ticket never happened, or I forgot about it and neglected to pay it, in which case the police would’ve issued a warrant for my arrest. This would also be on record. It wasn’t.
Emboldened, I sent another email to my agent challenging the second ticket on the grounds stated in the previous paragraph. A day later, here’s the response I received:
Hi Tim, I have some good news for you! The second speeding ticket is one and the same as the ticket on 10/16/2012. Evidently, when we initially did the quote that was the best guess estimate. The underwriters took the 1/1/13 date as an additional ticket.
As you can see, when mistakes are made in my country, rather than apologizing, some of my compatriots default to the positive spin. In this case, absent was any awareness by the agent that he wasted my time, absent was any concern about my feeble memory, absent was any hint of regret that he and his underwriters made a mistake. Instead, he had “good news” for me.
Now compare my agent’s happy spin to this story as told to me years ago by an American friend who used to run an English school in Japan.
“One of my adult (Japanese) students back in the late 80′s worked for Hitachi. I just so happened to have a Hitachi VCR that stopped working for no apparent reason. I made the “mistake” of mentioning it to him one evening after class and wanted to know where I could get it repaired. Well, you’d think I blamed him for it not working, as I was totally unprepared for what ensued.
“He immediately apologized profusely for the defective product and insisted on taking it to his factory where he worked to have it fixed. I balked, but he continued his apologizing and practically demanded that I turn it over to him which I did. To top it off, he returned to my house about a half hour later with his own VCR for me to use so I wouldn’t be inconvenienced while mine was being repaired!
“How’s that for customer service? An employee apologizing for his entire firm and personally taking the product to the factory to have it repaired! Would, or could that ever happen in the US? I think not.
“My VCR was personally returned to me about a week later with more apologies along with a 10 pack of blank cassettes, courtesy of the company, for a “defective” product!”
But Tim, You Can Get Sued for Apologizing!
First, the obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, although I occasionally play one on social media.
Kidding aside, in my previous article, Japanese Customer Service Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry, some folks pointed out in my LinkedIn feed that apologizing in the U.S. can be used against you in a court of law.
No doubt that this is true in some situations, an obvious example being accidents that involve costly damage, injury, and/or death. Indeed, the warning on the back of my old auto insurance card says it all:
“If you get into an accident, do not apologize, even if you believe you are at fault.”
God forbid we apologize and expose our poor, helpless insurance companies to financial liability!
But let’s not pretend that all apologies for bad service are fraught with legal jeopardy. Dare I say that most are not? Does a waiter avoid apologizing for bringing you the wrong entree because he fears getting sued? How about a hotel clerk who can’t check in her guests because the computer is down? Or a lazy insurance agent who issues an outrageously expensive quote based on false information? Whatever one’s reason for not apologizing, it is a deliberate choice to forego a high-impact-zero-cost measure with high potential to quickly improve a bad situation.
I’d be remiss not to acknowledge here that the Japanese apology is not always sincere. (Shocking, I know!) Personally, I’ll take a fake apology over a rude server every time.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t expect Americans to behave like the Japanese. What I did expect in this instance was for my agent to preface his words with a simple “I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding, here’s how the mix up occurred, and here’s how we’ll rectify the matter.”
It would have taken the agent five seconds to utter those words, it costs nothing, and would’ve instantly disarmed me. So his reason for not apologizing is beyond me. What I know for certain is that it wasn’t fear of a lawsuit.
Admittedly, I’ve been spoiled by high-quality Japanese customer service for way too long. But regardless of culture, is a simple apology too much to ask for? In my country, sometimes it is.
Postmortem: This story did not end well for the unrepentant agent. His omission of an apology and overall shitty communication skills were deal-breakers for me. Since my incumbent insurer’s service had never been an issue, and my reigning agent had demonstrated the ability to apologize in the past, it was worth staying put, even if it meant paying slightly higher premiums.
© Tim Sullivan 2022
