Basecamp founder Jason Fried:“If customers trust your apologies, you’re doing a lot of things right”

Companies and politicians are really bad at apologizing properly. What they typically say is, we apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you. Right? You'll see this in press releases, you'll see this in statements, you'll see it on the news. Talking heads make it all the time. We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you. And that's not a real apology. And here's why. If you're at a coffee shop and you've got some hot coffee and you trip and you spill it on somebody, what you say is, I'm so sorry. Oh, my God, I can't. I'm so sorry. That's what you say when you mean it. You don't say, I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused you. Right? You say what you mean, which is, I'm sorry. This one on the right or left, I guess for you guys is what you say when you're full of shit. You don't care. So what I found is that when you just say simply, I'm sorry, here's what happened, here's how we're going to fix it, here's how it won't happen or why it won't happen again, you're going to end up with a much more trusting customer base. And something that was said last year here at Big Omaha by Jeffrey from Threadless at that time was, besides making money and staying in business and all that stuff, one of the great measures of figuring out if you're actually a good business or not is if your customers trust your apologies, if they believe your apologies. And if people do not believe your apologies, then you've got a lot of stuff wrong. If people do believe your apologies, you've got a lot of stuff right. I think that's a really strong point, a really good point to keep in mind that if people trust your apologies, you're doing a whole lot of stuff right. They're not going to trust one that says, we apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused, but they will trust one that says, I'm sorry, here's what happened, and it won't happen again. So don't let your lawyers apologize for you. If you're a business owner, you should be doing the apologies. You should take all the responsibility for this stuff and say you're sorry and explain what happened and don't let it happen again. People are very, very forgiving when you do it like that.