Minutes, 2/15/2012

Class Minutes: 15 February 2012

Prepared by: Leah Sutton

Present: Jacqueline, Carmen, Leah, Brooke, Casey, Jordan, Robert, Remington, and Suzanne

We began with Jacqueline reviewing the minutes from last week.

Suzanne then introduced our topic for today: letters of adjustment/apology. They are difficult to write because of their sensitivity. We began with an example from Kaldi’s about a bad experience a regular customer had with a manager, for which Suzanne felt compelled to issue an apology.

She shared some famous examples including Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol incident in 1982. Tylenol was recalled by Johnson & Johnson and they issued a letter of warning along with paying for a national advertisement campaign warning people of the investigation. Though the case was never solved, it was concluded that the bottles had been tampered with and it is now recognized as a “safe brand.”

In contrast, BP Amoco did not do any of the above in dealing with the oil spill in 2010. They were not proactively sharing information, prompting outside investigation. The damage not only to the environment but to their brand is immeasurable.

We reviewed Suzanne's guidelines for apology letters, which instructs us to 1) acknowledge, 2) apologize, 3) appreciate, and 4) adjust ($$).

Suzanne read to us a famous “non-apology” from Netflix when they attempted to split their streaming services from their DVD company and received many customer complaints. CEO and Co-founder Reed Hastings was in fact ridiculed for this letter.

Finally we reviewed the assignment for Monday—Suzanne read us the letter of complaint to Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Airlines, to which we must write a response letter of apology. We began to work on these letters in class.