If you’re like me and scour the various tech blogs and social media channels, you're probably familiar with [or at least aware of] the Ocean Marketing fiasco.  If not, you can catch the story's summary from Zdnet here.

After discussing the debacle with my colleague, Jason Bennett, he mentioned a takeaway that continues to stick with me: “It’s amazing how much of this could have been diffused with a simple, early apology”.

Thankfully, most [hopefully, all] of us are not like Mr. Cristoforo; we don't engage clients in angry, condescending email threads. However, we've all encountered periods of stress where things can become a bit tense. The perspective that Jason gave me was simple;  Apologize early, diffuse the situation.

A recent study reported by The Alpha Galileo Foundation showed that following a mishap, customers who were sent an apology were more likely to respond positively than customers who were simply offered some sort of compensation. The Nottingham School of Economics, who conducted the research, found that customers of a large Ebay seller were more likely to remove their negative feedback when sent a simple apology, acknowledging the seller's error and regret.  This was in comparison to a set of customers who were sent an offer to remove their negative feedback in exchange for a small amount of money.

The results are surprisingly definitive.  Only 23% of folks removed their negative reviews in exchange for money, while 45% responded to a clear apology by removing their negative reviews.

Sure, a solution is of utmost importance and will need to exist, but, a simple, clear, sincere, and early apology should not be understated. When something goes wrong, remember to acknowledge your fault. You may find it to have a surprisingly positive impact.

Companies love to say they “go the extra mile” for their customers, a phrase that’s beyond cliché. Worse, so many questions go unasked when this is said – how much effort is in the “extra?”   Does a single mile really matter if you have already gone 400 “miles” in a project?  Why does the statement focus on quantity over quality?

At Exsilio Solutions, we don’t focus on the amount of “miles” – we do what is best for our clients. In our experience, the client doesn’t care if you planned and only completed a certain number of “miles;” they care that their project was successful, on time, and exceeded their expectations at every step. 

For example, our project managers are not simply communication pipelines between our tactical teams and the client, managing schedules with just to check a milestone off the list. We expect and train our project managers to go deeper and comprehensively grasp what the requirements are, and completely understand literally every step it takes to get it done. Gathering requirements means not just writing down what you’re told, but listening to the business problem, and shaping the solution to ensure the most success. “Solutions” is a part of our company name for a reason – we’re actively solving challenges, not just building software or marketing campaigns based on what’s heard. In this way, our project managers trend toward hybrid project/program managers by industry definition, but we believe our customers are served better by a partner who can collaborate at any level of detail, with any audience. Project results and client feedback consistently confirm this is a sound approach.

Another example is our creative department. We humbly believe we have one of the best creative teams around. Not only are they skilled graphic artists, but more importantly they put down their digital pens to listen and think critically about business requirements before they create their first pixel. Pencils to paper and markers to whiteboards are how they tackle business challenges first, designing a solution that works to not only meet the customer’s needs, but be accomplishable by the tools available to our developers. With our enterprise application projects, we’re often solving complex user experience interaction challenges. It’s not unusual for our team to discuss a feature at length, create presentation-ready wireframes, and through this process discover a better way of doing it, and then reproduce the entire wireframe to match. The first solution would have worked, and would have technically met the requirements, but it didn’t meet or exceed the spirit of the business problem, so we felt it had to be redone to produce the best result.

This is the pursuit of excellence at Exsilio Solutions. We seek it out and instill it in our team. We apply the principle to our projects with the simple belief that if we do our absolute best for the client, shared success will be self-fulfilling, and the momentum will carry into future projects and a strong working partnership. If you’ve had the chance to work with us before, we hope you agree. If you’re considering Exsilio Solutions for your next project, we look forward to showing you our best.