How to say sorry 500,000 times

Or, 4 Steps to deal with a major email mistake.  

Ever send an email that wasn’t ready to be received? Perhaps it included a misspelled name, or was meant for someone else. Remember the anxious feeling when you find the mistake? Now multiply that feeling by almost one million emails sent out in error. 

While in a previous role, my leader alerted me of a strange email he received three times from us in the past hour.  The email congratulated the recipient for purchasing the product and described the features and benefits.  The only clue it was not right was the subtle “{Test}” in the subject title.  Some frantic calls discovered that our email delivery vendor had tested a draft email in a live account and sent over 1 million emails to customers and leads.  Since leads far outnumber our sales, almost 90% of the recipients did not own the product. 

Here are 4 key lessons from this stomach sinking experience:

1. Risk Assessment

The first question to ask is “how severe is the mistake?”  It’s here where you gather information to estimate the damage and determine next steps as part of an incident report.   On the low side of severity are minor grammar, spelling, and other superficial formatting mistakes.  These types of errors are too trivial to waste more of a customer’s time by sending a retraction.  On the high side of severity are confusion, misrepresentation, libel and lawsuits.   

Calculating how many people were impacted can be tricky for email.  You can look at total sent, sent to a unique address, opened, and clicked through.  In my case, we could see over 1MM emails sent to over 500,000 unique addresses, 25% of the emails had been opened, 4% had clicked through the enclosed link.  Don’t rely on the opened rate, however, since Gmail and other service providers allow a user to preview the email without opening it.  Better to face the music than slink away in hopes people didn’t notice.   The following illustration helps show risk components at several levels.

2. Initial Response: Acknowledge and Apologize

For more severe issues, the sooner you recognize the issue, the sooner you can move on. Today’s educated and empowered customers cannot be fooled for long.  Acknowledging the mistakes you make shows respect and speeds forgiveness and recovery of the damaged relationship.  Indeed, do it with some style and grace, and you may be able to turn a negative into a positive.    

Contents of an effective apology:

1)     Be sincere.  One way to achieve this is to make sure to include your name on the response so it comes from a real person.

2)     Thank the customer for their patience and loyalty

3)     Have a Plan on how to improve the situation and reduce future failures. 

4)     Got the extra mile: Depending on the severity, it is sometimes also appropriate to offer:

      - Online FAQs or a dial in hotline

      - Discounts / reward points for the inconvenience

      - Encourage feedback

Here is an example of an apology message sent to me recently.  In this case, the service was sincere and added some “Ooops” humor to lighten the message.

Additional Precautions to minimize damage:

• Share the issue with privacy and compliance for related advice.
• Develop talking points/FAQ for your front line agents who may encounter this.
• Establish a process for customers who feel the need to escalate.   Be clear on who should field these escalations and what that person can offer in terms of explanation and conciliatory offers.

3. Cost Assessment:
The next part is to do an accurate assessment of the cost of this incident on your business.  It’s helpful to think of each contact point with a prospect/customer as an asset.  Having a valid email address increases the opportunity to encourage profitable behavior at a lower cost than other channels like phone and post. 

How valuable a valid email address is depends on your business.  In my case we estimated the value of valid lead based on increased probability to buy and customer addresses based on reduced cost to service and increased persistency. With these valuations, we were ready to calculate the costs with the following equation (can also be used for phone #s, app downloads, direct mail DNSS…):

# Leads that Unsubscribed & Spam listed * increased probability to buy * average product value

+

# Customers that Unsubscribed & Spam listed * reduction in persistency of unsubscribed * average product value

+

# unsubscribed customers *average reduction in operational costs for email opted in customers
 +

Management time to address the issue
+

Partner Cost for the flawed campaign, the apology campaign and per 1000 emails sent
+

# of customer calls received related to confusion * cost/call
+

Regulatory and legal Costs (if applicable)

 

4. The Debrief

I like to think of these mistakes as investments in learning.  It’s important to take the time once the dust settles to capture the key learnings from the incident.  We convened a full incident review inviting the vendor, stakeholders, and business users from other units.  The meeting covered the incident report, root cause, and improvement opportunities.  As a result we:

• introduced a new quality check,
• refined the required qualifications for vendor resources  eligible to work on the account
• established a monthly quality dashboard
• Initiated a quarterly best practice sharing session 

Mistakes happen.  What differentiates people and businesses is how they react to these challenges and work to regain trust and keep the relationship.