Now, THIS I love! Southwest has essentially hired a Chief Forgiveness Officer.


A fellow named Fred Taylor Jr., with the formal title of Senior Manager of Proactive Customer Communications, spends his 12-hour workdays finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers. He then fires off homespun letters of apology and "touches" to ease the situation. THAT'S what I'm talking about.
Bully for Southwest for doing this because, well, it's the right thing to do. Our moms told us when you hurt someone, intentionally or not, you apologize.
For some reason, corporations mostly don't think this applies to them. Maybe they think their customers won't notice so much if they don't bring it up. Or some lawyer told them not to mention it.
When is the Apology Sincere vs. a "Tactic"?
When I was at Lands' End, we made a mistake doing something, I can't remember what it was now. But we felt really bad about what it was and wanted to apologize to customers. So we hand-wrote out a bunch of notes that we sent out that said we were sorry, and went on to say why it had occurred (one of my cardinal rules for making up with customers) and explained how we had fixed the situation.
At the same time, we wanted to have a bit of fun with this -- so we actually put in crushed egg shells in the envelope. You know, egg on our face and all of that. It was funny -- it was, well, very Lands' End at that time.
The point of this is that we did all of this stuff because it was true to our nature. And we apologized because we cared -- truly. And this is why Southwest does what they do - their actions are informed from the right place.
But now that everyone else is on the apology bandwagon -- are we going to be numbed by the outpouring of letters that we receive as customers? For all of the **&^%$$^& crazy stuff going on -- are we going to be getting apology letters constantly?
The Airlines are realizing that culpability is important and they are mea-culping all over the place. Great, that's step one. But anyone who says they are sorry have got to mean it. Step two is taking action to make the pain stop.
It's just like when our little brothers punched us, then said he was sorry because mom made him. You never really took him totally seriously a) because mom was twisting his arm behind his back to say the words, and b) he'd apologized many times before just to come back and punch another day.