Are Apologies for a Service Failure Always the Best Policy?

Technological advancements enable firms to anticipate service failures and apologize to consumers more effectively than ever, according to a recent report in the Journal of Consumer Research.

However, apologies might not always be the best policy. Researchers conducted five experiments, including a large-scale field experiment, which demonstrated that apologies backfire when consumers are not aware of the failure.

Apologies decrease consumer satisfaction, trust, recommendation intentions, and repeat patronage behavior, the researchers found, because apologies increase awareness that a failure occurred.

Furthermore, apologies backfire for both mild and severe failures when room to increase awareness of the failure is available. Additionally, apologies backfire over notifications about a service failure. Although both apologies and notifications increase awareness of the aspect of the service experience that was a failure, apologies uniquely increase awareness that this constituted a failure.

Beyond increasing awareness, apologies backfire by decreasing perceived service quality and competence.

However, apologies also increase perceived warmth and honesty, the researchers found. Consequently, apologizing can be beneficial when consumers are already aware of a failure because apologies are less likely to backfire and more likely to enhance positive perceptions of the firm.

The researchers believe these findings challenge the conventional wisdom that apologies are always the best policy when something goes wrong and provide insight into when to apologize.