Who is regretting the inconvenience?

I heard a comedian riff on the term “inconvenience regretted” on YouTube the other day. It got me worked up too.

Why do brands do this? Bland, banal, insincere messages to customers when they mess up. Oh, did we “inconvenience” you? “Regretted.” In passive voice, too! Regretted by whom? The customer rep who has to deal with you? The particular department that messed up? The CEO? The board of directors? The universe?

The unspoken truth? The only person regretting anything is you, the hapless customer. You will regret ever dealing with us. Everyone else is just fine.

If we’re in truth-telling mode, let’s continue to spill the beans. We, the organization, don’t regret anything. Your “inconvenience”, customer, is a necessary part of the business model. We can’t keep all of you whiners and complainers happy all the time, so your occasional, even frequent, unhappiness is baked into the system. We know we will mess you up from time to time, we even plan for it. All we hope is that our carefully worded platitudes will stop you from bolting. We need to retain you, grumbling and all.

The problem is not insincere language. It is insincere economics. The customer’s unhappiness is an operating assumption.

Companies apologize (or seem to) while preserving every incentive that caused the failure. The service team may genuinely care, but the system rewards lower staffing, longer queues, hidden charges, difficult cancellations and minimal compensation.

When is an apology sincere? When it costs something. The organization actually accepts a consequence: refunds the money; removes the charge; replaces the product; changes the process; makes someone accountable.

If you don’t do any of that, you’re just spraying regret-flavoured air freshener onto the scene of the crime.

Too much rant? I apologize to the few who don’t operate like this. If you’re serious about great customer experience, stay with me.

The real problem is not bad apology-writing; it is that many organizations reward themselves for causing the very inconvenience they pretend to regret. Active choices are being made: too few people answering calls; convoluted cancellation processes; delayed refunds and charges difficult to reverse; frontline staff armed with scripts but no authority.

So the company may say it’s regretting the inconvenience, but someone higher up is celebrating the saving.

A real apology does four things. 

First, it names the failure. Don’t be sorry for something as amorphous as “inconvenience”; be sorry for wasting people’s time, for making them come repeatedly or levying unfair charges. 

Second, it owns the failure. We did this, we regret it, and we will put it right. 

Third, it repairs the damage. It refunds money, waives the charge, or replaces the item. 

And last, it prevents a repeat. It rethinks the process and authorises the employee to act.

Names. Owns. Repairs. Prevents.

All of that will cost you money. Are you ready for that? 

The remedy must start high up in the organization, indeed at board level. You will have to stop rewarding departments for savings that create customer pain. You will have to give frontline employees both the power and the budget to resolve problems ASAP. You will have to make the department that caused the failure bear its cost. And you will have to put recurring customer harm on executive scorecards.

Up for that? Great, go for it. You may suffer higher costs in the short term, but you will earn trust and loyalty that compound for decades. If you’re in business for the long term, this makes total sense.

But if your organization’s aim is just to maximize profit (and everyone’s bonuses) in the here and now, then you have the correct business model. Pretend to care, repeat the pain, trouser the savings. In fact, you just wasted your precious time reading this piece today. 

Inconvenience regretted.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

If nothing changes, nothing was regretted 

 

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