The customer might always be right, but apologies actually backfire in customer service
Are apologies always the best policy? New research finds that in food service, they can actually make things worse for businesses and customers.
The customer is always right. It’s the first rule of customer service, one that often means “I’m sorry” is the de facto response if mistakes are made.
But new research indicates that the age-old maxim might not hold water. In fact, apologies might actually make things worse, both for businesses and customers.
Researchers at Northeastern University found that when customers were not aware of mistakes, like food delivery delays or technical glitches when ordering online groceries, a business issuing an apology only drew attention to the error and made customers more critical of the business. Instead of making a business seem more transparent, the researchers found that apologies only made the business appear less trustworthy and more incompetent.
That resulted in real financial harm.
Customers who received an apology for a 15-minute food delivery delay, for example, were less likely to place an order with the business over the next 90 days. That translates to an estimated $65,171 that a business lost from customers not returning.
“The common wisdom was always to apologize,” said Mary Steffel, an associate professor of marketing at Northeastern University. “But what all of our studies show is the exact opposite, that apologizing in this sort of situation actually backfires and decreases satisfaction, trust, recommendation intentions and repeat orders.”
Through a combination of surveys and a field study that involved testing on a real business, the researchers found that transparency and honesty are still vital. But businesses do need to take into account how much they communicate with their customers, said Paul Fombelle, an associate professor of marketing at Northeastern.
“In this world of transparency and honesty, we’re not trying to advertise for being sketchy or anything like that,” Fombelle said. “This is still within the realm of [being] a good, ethical company. … But these light, marginal errors really backfire more than one would think.”
The researchers partnered with an unnamed food delivery company, a regional competitor to Uber Eats and Grubhub in the U.S., which allowed them to change its customer service strategy to test this idea in the real world. They instructed the company on when to apologize or not for orders that were up to 15 minutes late. After 15 minutes, the owner of the company insisted they would apologize no matter what.
They then tracked how likely customers were to return to that business and found that not only were customers who received apologies less likely to patronize the business again. If they did return, they placed fewer orders, delayed their next purchases and spent less money overall.
In a follow-up survey, customers who received an apology also indicated “they were less satisfied,” Steffel said. They trusted the company less and were less likely to recommend it to other people, all of which impacts a business’ bottom line.
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The $65,171 revenue gap that the researchers said accounts for the impact of apologies is significant for a small to mid-sized business like the ones that were tested. But it could become even more worrying “when you start to scale it up to some of these bigger companies,” Fombelle said.
Notably, other strategies for notifying a customer about an error didn’t generate the same level of dissatisfaction. Steffel and Fombelle also tested the effectiveness of sending customers a notification that their food delivery time had been or delayed, not an outright apology.
Even with an awareness that their delivery had been delayed, those customers were more satisfied than those who received an apology.
“It’s about the apology conveying to people that it’s not only that your delivery time was updated but that your delivery time was updated and this constitutes a failure,” Steffel said.
Steffel and Fombelle noted that there are still cases where apologies help businesses.
Apologies were effective when customers already knew a mistake had been made. If a food delivery was cancelled for one reason or another, or if a customer had already filed a complaint, Steffel and Fombelle found that apologizing actually increased customer satisfaction. In these situations, apologies work as intended: They make customers see the business as more warm and honest, Steffel said. There are also extreme cases, like a hazardous product defect, that should require a business to alert their customers either with an apology or notification.
Managers are understandably tempted to apologize as soon as they know a mistake has been made, Steffel acknowledged. The key is knowing when and, more importantly, when not to communicate with customers. Notifications are a worthwhile alternative, Steffel and Fombelle advised.
The customer is still always right, but that doesn’t mean they need an apology.
“If you apologize and then the failure doesn’t actually occur, people are less satisfied than if you hadn’t said anything, even though they actually didn’t experience a failure at all,” Steffel said. “In other cases, are they going to be aware that the food was five, 10, 15 minutes late? In those situations, our recommendation would be to either notify customers without an apology or stay silent because in those situations, apologizing could do more damage than good.”
