Being typically British we often find it hard to say sorry, in fact just being rather proud in general we can find it a challenge. It can dent our pride and quite frankly we simply don’t like to admit we have got it wrong. But, when you have to apologise on behalf of a whole company, well that’s just another thing entirely!
In the world of automated marketing with content being delivered to customers across our social channels, marketing campaigns are often auto scheduled to go out at specific times in order to reach a specific audience. That’s all well and good and hopefully maximises the impact of your campaign, but because you ‘trust’ that the content you have scheduled to got out will go out as you intended sometimes this is open to the occasional error.
Hello [FIRST NAME]
Ikea encountered this very issue with one of their summer marketing campaigns and came up with a brilliant yet really simple way to both acknowledge there had been an issue and apologise at the same time.
Like the majority of people I’m sure, I receive daily emails informing me about offers and promotions from various stores about a variety of items. You know, those marketing ones that distract you from your work and you suddenly find you’ve bought a deckchair and parasol and an assortment of garden pots for no apparent reason – anyway… This particular email from Ikea caught my (and clearly a few other customers) attention for all the wrong reasons as it started Hello [FIRST NAME] before going on to talk about the promotion. Now most of us probably wouldn’t notice if the date on an email was wrong and we may notice if the name of the town or our address was slightly incorrect, but when it’s our name, well, that’s just not acceptable is it?! What it looked like was that no one had bothered to enter the customers name into the email marketing template. One can only assume that the template was meant to auto-populate from a merge field and for some reason it hadn’t, and worse still the emails had all been sent.
Now let me say first off, these things can happen and I’ve done it myself. I produce a weekly internal comms newsletter at Countrywide and not wishing to bring this to everyone’s attention (oh the shame!), I managed to email the newsletter out one week across four business divisions; including the senior team, with the name of one of the staff members somehow inserted into the title field!
The moment I received the first ‘have you seen what you’ve done’ phone call I went into panic mode thinking do I recall the whole email? Should I send it again, correctly, in the hope no one will have noticed? Do I issue an apology, especially to the named individual, do I hide under my desk and hope it will all go away?!… Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that the same scenes were played out at the marketing offices of Ikea but what they did I thought was brilliant, so much so I actually shared it on my twitter as a great example of just what you should do upon such an occasion.
WE’RE SORRY [FIRST NAME] (OR SHOULD THAT BE JAMES!)
Ikea didn’t immediately issue an apology, they didn’t even attempt to retract the email, what they did was a few weeks later send out their usual marketing email entitled ‘WE’RE SORRY [FIRST NAME] (OR SHOULD THAT BE JAMES!). Just brilliant!!
Recognition it went a bit wrong, eye-catching enough to make you think ‘oh no they’ve only gone and done it again’ followed by the realisation of ‘oh no they haven’t!’ and more so that they were acknowledging and saying sorry! Not that I dwelled on it, but if I’m honest it had bugged me a little, not strongly enough for me to complain, but it had just sat at the back of my mind as a little niggle. Well, no longer. Faith was restored and customer satisfaction just went through the roof!
Being confident enough to publically engage with your customers and admit something didn’t work demonstrates your commitment to putting things right and show’s you actually notice the detail and care. Whoever’s decision it was to send that apology email I personally think was excellent and a great move.
We can all learn by how the larger brands act in the market place but sometimes corporate restraints mean you can’t be as creative as you’d wish. I think what Ikea did there was to show they are truly engaged with their audience and customer base. They knew something hadn’t gone according to plan and instead of just ignoring it and moving on they turned a potential negative into a great positive. I only wish they had made their mistake about three weeks earlier around the time I made mine! Great work guys!!
About James
James Biley is the Marketing & Communications Director for Countrywide Estate Management, Granville & Company and HLM.
The #BeMoreSocial column was created for Flat Living and its goal is to drive more effective communication within the property management industry.
If you have a customer service experience using any form of marketing or social media that you’d like to share then tweet @JamesBiley and @FlatLivingLoves using the #BeMoreSocial. We’d love to feature your examples in a future edition.
