The Difference between ‘Sorry if’ and ‘Sorry that’

Many companies world wide seem to drive different marketing campaigns and slogans highlighting how dedicated they are to customers’ satisfaction.

With over 1 million companies using ISO9001 (1), there is a hope that business models putting customers are the heart of the entire operations is becoming the norm. Having worked in various sectors, it’s always the little things that get missed out, and cause a significant back lash.

While I have been working as a Quality Professional for all my career, focusing on customers (internally and externally) have been the focus of what I do. However, after many years of driving operational governance through audits and process improvements, I decide to brush up on my Customer Experience skills; skills I have gained from my early career working with one of the top banks in the Kuwait and the Middle East, and the best retailer in the Middle East (my own experience and rating). I subscribed to the CX Academy (2) to obtain a certificate in the Customer Experience Framework.

If you have been following my blog, you know by now how much I appreciate a framework, or a benchmark that helps companies drive change. Today’s post, I will talk about the little things that matter in a service based on an experience, rather than the framework itself. Let me explain!

Social media and rating platforms have made expectations easily influenced. Depending on your character, your buying behaviour can be significantly influenced by these reviews. But if there is anything I believe in that we can agree on, it’s that as customers we all know and understand that sometimes things go wrong.

Something many companies still don’t seem to grasp unfortunately.

And because customers are a lot more connected and a lot more informed, their expectations are becoming more demanding. It is the topic of every customer experience professional:

Customers are more likely to become loyal when you have resolved an issue to them in a remarkable way, than if no issues happened during their engagement.

What I don’t understand is why in 2022, companies still fail to deliver the basics of service quality to front line staff, being call centre teams, social media handles, or any other customer facing channel.

Here is an experience I encountered recently: I had a bad experience, as a customer, with a company that’s supposed to complete a repair in my apartment. I tweeted them stating the problem and their social media agent picked up my tweet promptly. Customer service ✅ I thought. Hopefully the issue can be fixed. When the social media agent responded to my tweet, they said:

We are sorry IF we caused you any inconvenience.

To me this is bad Customer Experience ❌. I do not understand why after I tweeted my dissatisfaction with the process of the repair, they still were not sure whether I was inconvenienced or not.

Going through the CX framework, they define 6 key pillars that companies must understand and invest in. And the two that stands out to me are:

You Get me
You Fix things

Both of these pillars appear to be totally missed by the company I am dealing with. I remember this from years ago, and now it has been confirmed by the CX training course:

Happy customers share their story with few people, where as dissatisfied customers share their stories with 100s; especially in the age of social media.

All this social media agent needed to do is put a bit more care in the response to me. I was unsatisfied in the first place that is why I tweeted them asking for support. If they had tweeted me with ‘Sorry that you are inconvenienced…” that by itself would have demonstrated to me that they understood how I felt.

The impact of ‘if’ over ‘that’.

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