Carly Buxton, PhD

From a customer perspective, an “I’m sorry” is so valuable, and yet from the company side, it too often seems difficult to offer.

“Sorry” is a powerful part of service recovery.

This is a lesson that I was taught as a flight attendant at Delta. We were told to apologize whenever a customer was miffed, no matter what, even if it was very clearly not our fault. Your travel agent told you that your suitcase would fit in the overhead bins, and it doesn’t? I’m so sorry. Your seatmate is hogging the armrest? I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, we aren’t able to offer peanuts on this flight. SORRY, SORRY, SORRY!!

Once on a full flight from Tokyo to Detroit, a flight attendant on my crew accidentally bumped a Japanese passenger’s knee with her cart. I was on the flight as the language-of-destination Japanese speaker, so although I had been up front at the time and was nowhere near the cart when it happened, you better believe I was falling all over the man with大変申し訳ございません (which is about as subservient as apologies can get in Japanese) for the rest of the 12-hour flight.

Imagine how interested I was a year or so after my stint as a flight attendant to read in my doctoral dissertation research that Arlie Hochschild, pioneer of the sociology of emotions, had actually studied precisely this sort of training among Delta flight attendants for her book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1979).

Hochschild used the term “emotional labor” to refer to the process of managing one’s emotions and emotional expression, a type of paid labor common in the service industry. The dissonance of performing emotional labor (i.e., acting on a surface level in a certain way, despite what you earnestly feel) is apparently pretty taxing on the psyche of the service employee herself, and yet, it’s a critical part of what the company is selling. Human emotions are themselves commoditized as workers transact in the appropriate displays of emotion: those that are expected by the customer.

As a flight attendant, I saw first-hand how powerful an apology could be. Acknowledging a customer’s frustration truly brings down the tension in a situation, and it’s not hard to give, especially once you get used to the surface acting of it all, and especially if your own supervisors are likewise acknowledging the emotional labor you’re performing in team meetings and the like. So why are company reps sometimes so stubborn, withholding their “sorrys” when they could make a major difference in customer satisfaction in a moment of service recovery?

My theory is that the hesitation to apologize often stems from concerns about legal liability. In an increasingly litigious society, some company reps—or those who write the service scripts— worry that expressing remorse or acknowledging fault could potentially be used against them in legal proceedings.

The fear is that a customer might misconstrue an apology as an admission of guilt or wrongdoing, leading to demands for compensation or even lawsuits.

However, in reality, a sincere apology or expression of empathy does not typically constitute a legally binding admission of fault. For an admission to be legally viable, it generally needs to meet specific criteria, such as being made voluntarily, with clarity and specificity, and by someone with the appropriate authority and competence to make such an admission.

I’m no legal expert, but saying “I’m sorry for the inconvenience” or acknowledging a customer’s frustration rarely meets the legal threshold for an admission of liability. It’s simply an empathetic gesture aimed at defusing a tense situation and providing better customer service.

Another reason that reps might withhold their “sorrys” has to do with the very conclusions Hochschild made: it’s taxing, exhausting, draining, and hard for those on the front-lines to perform that emotional labor so consistently. It whittles away at us each time we have to act sorry when we are, in fact, not very sorry at all. The recommendation here is a bit of a reframe: encourage your reps that while they may not be sorry for what happened, they may indeed feel actually bummed that things didn’t go to plan for this customer. They can feel sorry for the customer’s status without shouldering the blame for it.

As a customer experience leader, there are a few key things you can do to foster a more empathetic service culture:

1. Train your staff on the power of apologies and emotional acknowledgment in diffusing customer frustration and improving customer satisfaction, even if the issue was not directly their fault.

2. If there are concerns about legal implications in certain industries, coach your team to acknowledge the customer’s feelings without using the word “sorry.” For example: “I understand this situation must be incredibly frustrating for you.”

3. Encourage and appreciate your customer service employees when they demonstrate emotional labor and provide empathetic service. Validate the effort it takes and give them an outlet to decompress.

4. Remind representatives that an apology or expression of empathy is not the same as an admission of legal liability. It’s simply acknowledging the customer’s perspective and frustration.

Ultimately, creating a culture of empathy and emotional intelligence in your service team can pay dividends in customer loyalty and satisfaction, whether the misstep is real or perceived, major or seemingly insignificant.

So let’s these to your script—or your own service recovery vocabulary today, and see how it improves your satisfaction scores and repeats.

I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this.

I’m sorry we didn’t deliver a better experience for you.

This must be frustrating for you.

I hope we can make it up to you in the future.