Empathy Expansion Kit: Saying Sorry - The Art of the Empathetic Apology

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. In this short empty expansion kit episode, we're covering the topic of saying sorry, the art of the empathetic apology in business. I am Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa. Hey, Tullio, let's get going on this. So empathetic heartfelt apologies are essential to, maintaining that trust and customer loyalty, especially after a service failure or mistake. It happens to all of us. But is there a formula to do it and still express your sincerity and be real and authentic at the same time? Tullio, what are the components of what would be an empathetic apology? Where do we start?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:05)
Well, first of all, we have to acknowledge it's really difficult to admit wrong or to take accountability for when we wronged others. So that in itself takes tremendous courage, vulnerability and strength.
But there's a few things that can really help in terms of enabling an empathetic apology. First, starts with explaining and really acknowledging what we're in wrong. Like, don't footy dance around it. You know, be specific of what the mistake was or the failure and directly address it without downplaying it or minimizing the issue. Nothing worse than downplanning or minimizing a situation. Just admit to it head on, face it head on. And this is important because acknowledgement really is the foundation of trust. And it shows that you are aware of the problem and you're not ignoring it or dismissing it, and you're certainly interested in the concerns that are being addressed for those that have been affected. And this step sets the tone for the rest of the apology. So it's like set the foundation first, right? Admit what it was, be open about it, don't downplay it. This is what we did. So that sets the tone for trust. For example, Domino's did a great job of this, Domino's Pizza. You know, they had gained a reputation in the early 2000s as the worst pizza chain in the market. I mean, people tested like their pizza and they were not happy with it, right? They would rather just have the home branded pizza. So they went out of their way through this major shift in late 2009 So imagine it took them that long to actually acknowledge the problem, but they did it. In fact, they started these commercial, sort of self-deprecating commercial that openly acknowledged that their pizza wasn't great and that they were committed to upgrading their product. So one of their slogan was, we know our pizza hasn't been great. This was a really great example of acknowledging what consumers were saying, so it made consumers feel validated, and more importantly, it was a commitment to say, we get it, we heard, we agree with you, and we're going to do something about it. That's the key thing too as part of the apology. It's not just acknowledging what went wrong, it's also saying, we agree with you. It's like acknowledging means taking it on to seeing it from the other points of view. That's part of being empathetic is to actually experience it and saying, yeah, we get it, we're with you. We see it too, we feel it. We not only heard you, but we agree with you.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:58)
Yeah, it's hard to hear anything else. You sometimes have to say if you're still waiting for this acknowledgement of this problem and they're still just, it's not being addressed, so they may come up with all kinds of things to say, but it's still like, I still can't hear you exactly. Are you saying you're responsible for this? What's going on? What are we going to do? Once you have that acknowledgement, here's where you need to express empathy. We got that out there, the acknowledgement. Now, we need to go on the basic apology by expressing some genuine empathy for those affected. Put yourself in the customer's shoes. Understand how this may have impacted them emotionally or practically, and this will help connect on an emotional level. It shows that you care about the customer experience, and you understand the inconvenience or harm that was caused.
This might be where you say something like, yeah, we understand how frustrating this can be, or we're sorry for the inconvenience and stress this has caused you, and just be really reassuring that you understand what they're going through. We talked about this in one of the last episodes of this. You can also take a humorous approach too, if we're not talking like a huge problem here, but something that's just really inconvenient. We talked about KFC running out of chicken, or their supply chain just broke down. They took the ad out where they changed the KFC to FCK as we talked about and then said, a chicken restaurant without any chicken is not ideal. We're sorry. They were able to do this in a very humorous manner, because in reality, this isn't the end of the world for people. No lives are at stake, or at least they shouldn't be. I can't imagine the scenario.