Telstra’s apology for the 8 July outage reminded me of the famous line in Mercer Mayer’s classic Little Critter children’s book I’m Sorry: “Sometimes saying ‘I’m sorry’ just isn’t enough”.
Telstra apologised for the outage as well as a company could. But it still missed the mark because the quality of an apology depends on more than just its wording.
6 components of an effective apology
There’s solid research to back this up. In 2016, researchers led by psychologist Roy Lewicki broke an effective apology into six components:
- An expression of regret.
- An explanation of what went wrong.
- An acknowledgement of responsibility.
- A declaration of repentance.
- An offer of repair.
- A request for forgiveness.
The more you cover, the better; but two components are the most important: acknowledgement of responsibility, and an offer of repair. Telstra did the easy ones but fumbled the two that mattered most.
Where Telstra’s apology missed the mark
On the day of the incident, Telstra’s chief financial officer apologised “deeply, explained what went wrong (a time server bug), and accepted responsibility for it. Over following days, Telstra published updates about the outage and what affected customers could do, and sent customers an email apologising for letting them down and for the impact the outage had on them.
But the apology failed in the two most important components in Lewicki’s research: acknowledgement of responsibility and offer of repair.
Acknowledging responsibility means owning not just that it happened, but that you could have prevented it happening. Telstra couldn’t quite get there.
The bug was a known one: the vendor had flagged it, technicians had logged it back in 2022, and the company made an active decision not to fix it earlier this year.
An apology explaining a preventable failure without owning the decision not to prevent it isn’t an effective acknowledgement of responsibility.
The offer of repair was worse, because it was specific. Around 8,000 customers were reimbursed an average of $12.50 (with total compensation reaching roughly $100,000) for an outage that hit 8.8 million people and dropped hundreds of Triple Zero calls.
Their email to customers said they “know how much people rely on us to keep in touch, do their work, run businesses and stay safe” and that they’re “deeply sorry for the impact this had on so many people”.
But the compensation didn’t live up to those words. The low amount told customers what the company really thinks of their disrupted, occasionally frightening day was worth. Repair done badly, doesn’t just fail to deliver on the apology; it actively contradicts and undermines it.
Saying sorry and meaning it
The lesson for all of us is to say sorry and mean it.
When we’ve let people down, our first response is to focus on the apology. But that’s the easy and cheap part (even if many get it wrong). The hard and expensive part is really owning the failure and putting it right.
As a local appliance store in New Zealand (LV Martin) famously said in their adverts: “it’s the putting right that counts”.
