A tired employee is updating shipping orders late at night at a textbook brokerage. They make a mistake in the code and accidentally ship outdated management textbooks to an important customer. Three days later, classes have begun, and with demanding course loads, the students already feel behind. Many are seeking immediate replacements. Cue the angry phone calls and emails.

Thankfully, it is possible to repair the damage done. In fact, if this delicate situation is managed correctly, the company might actually come out ahead with its customers, a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

The service recovery paradox is a phenomenon in which a customer who experiences a problem with a product or service, but has that problem effectively resolved, is more likely to have a positive impression of the company than a customer who never experienced any problems. Essentially, when a company is able to effectively recover from a service failure, the customer’s satisfaction can actually increase beyond what it would have been if the failure had never happened.

How can your company use this paradox to its advantage? Every department in a company can make a mistake that sends out ripples. It all comes down to your apology message — and how you document, memorialize, and share the apology process both internally and with external stakeholders.

How to Craft an Apology Message

1. Restore lost value.

Your customer believes the balance of “fairness” has been thrown off by this problem. They want to know what you’re going to do to restore the perception of lost value they have incurred. Offer to repair the situation to secure the attention and trust of your customers. If you don’t lead with this step, the rest of the message won’t be nearly as effective.

In the textbook situation, examples could include sending additional resources related to the book that provide additional learning value. Perhaps there are videos, simulations, or other materials the school or students didn’t pay for that enhance the learning experience. The key is providing something that has perceived high value to the customer, but lower cost to you.

2. Acknowledge responsibility.

This doesn’t need to be overly complicated, but it is critical that you distinguish between offering an excuse for what happened and accepting responsibility for the mistake.

After the example coding mistake, pointing blame at another entity, like a supplier or distributor, would cause distrust and derail the apology. Your message has to clearly say that you take full responsibility for ensuring that the problem is resolved in their best interest. That your aim is to regain their full faith and confidence in you as a partner. And that you’re taking proactive and preventive steps to protect them from any further issues.

3. Explain the problem.

Customers want to know you have been able to precisely identify the problem and its root cause. This increases confidence that your proposed fixes will protect them from the same problem happening again.

In the case above, the textbook broker should explain that the code, while always functional, was referencing an outdated set of tables in the company’s database because of a manual coding error. You can acknowledge the mistake, and because you told customers that you’re creating multiple safeguards to fix the problem — tailored to the specific issue — the apology is much more likely to be received well.

4. Describe how you will fix the issue.

In this step, you are specifically explaining how you have fixed the problem and describing what measures you put in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

In the textbook example, this could include performing random audits of shipping orders to ensure additional, manual verification, as well as creating redundancies in the coding software that provide further checks on orders — such as checking whether a book going out is more than a year or two old, which could mean it’s a mistake and warrants extra attention. It could also include changing your process to not perform updates during peak busy seasons.

5. Express your regret.

The actual expression of regret (the “we’re sorry” part) is most effective once you’ve sufficiently addressed the concerns above, making your expression of regret even more sincere because it’s backed up with a lot of action. Customers respond better to a sincere apology. It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that your customer’s business was damaged, so acknowledge those effects.

In the textbook example, the broker should say something along the lines of, “We are sorry for the disruption to your business during a busy season for you. Hopefully, you can see and feel our commitment to retaining your confidence and trust. We apologize to both your company and your customers.”

This kind of statement conveys true regret and sincerity while also stressing that the problem is being addressed.

Sample Apology Message

Here’s an example of an apology message to use as a guide. In this case, a company is apologizing to a customer about a software outage that happened during one of their busiest times. It covers all of the critical parts you want to include in an apology message.

I want to attempt to repair any possible problems this outage caused for you, your team, or your employees. First, I have been approved to provide your company with a one-month refund, twice the length of your benefits sign-up period. It is an expanded refund in recognition that this happened at a peak time for your company. I have also directed our customer service team to manually check all sign-ups that occurred after the software came back online to be sure they were captured accurately. I will let you know the outcome as soon as it is complete, no longer than one week from now.

The software outage was entirely our fault. It should not have happened at all, let alone during such a critical time for your business. We take full responsibility and are committed to ensuring it will not happen again.

I fully regret that this outage occurred, and our teams are making the necessary changes to make sure it does not happen again. Our outages should be reserved for planned downtime, with advance communication, and we regret that we failed on both accounts in this situation.

To let you know what occurred, your software went down after a major power outage at one of our data centers. Your workload was rerouted to our other data centers, as part of our backup plan and service agreement. However, the second center your content was assigned to was down due to preventive maintenance and a hardware update. This caused your system to go down for a period as the system reconfigured to find the next alternative for your workload. We have now updated our redundancy system to avoid anything like this in the future.

I am exceptionally sorry for this outage, and as soon as I knew about it, I was in constant communication with our technical teams until it was resolved. On behalf of our company, I would like to apologize not only to you, but to your leadership team and all affected employees.

Document, Memorialize, and Share Your Apology Process

It is critical to explicitly document the apology effort made to the customer. That way, if someone makes another mistake in the future, the company can turn to an objective framework to craft a new apology message. By learning from the company’s past, your employees can avoid what didn’t work and provide better responses to future service failures.

Your apology process should also be shared and shown to outside stakeholders. This phenomenon, known as boundary spanning, is critical to the service recovery paradox because it not only shows vulnerability from the organization, but also shows other customers that the company can be relied upon in times of distress.

Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty.

In the age of knowledge, ideas are the foundation of success in almost every field. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t persuade anyone else to follow your vision, your influence and impact will be greatly diminished. And that’s why communication is no longer considered a “soft skill” among the world’s top business leaders. Leaders who reach the top do not simply pay lip service to the importance of effective communication. Instead, they study the art in all its forms — writing, speaking, presenting — and constantly strive to improve on those skills.

For example, while Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he put a premium on writing skills. In the summer of 2004, he surprised his leadership team and banned PowerPoint. He replaced slides with “narratively structured memos” that contained titles and full sentences with verbs and nouns.

Bezos is not alone among top leaders. “You cannot over-invest in communication skills — written and oral skills,” says former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who now serves on Amazon’s board. “If you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly, believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”

During my research for The Bezos Blueprint, I found a number of common tactics top leaders use when communicating with their teams. Here are four to try:

1. Use short words to talk about hard things.

Long, complicated sentences make written ideas hard to understand — they’re mentally draining and demand more concentration. You’ll win more fans if you replace long words and sentences with short ones.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes Nobel prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He argues that persuasive speakers and writers do everything they can to reduce “cognitive strain.”

Software tools like Grammarly assess writing quality by generating a numerical readability score. The score assigns a grade level to writing samples. For example, a document written for a person with at least an eighth-grade education (the average 13-year-old in the U.S.) is considered “very easy to read.” It does not imply that your writing sounds like an eighth grader wrote it. It simply means that your sophisticated arguments are easy to grasp — and ideas that are easy to understand are more persuasive.

Since writing is a skill, you can sharpen it with practice. Bezos improved as a writer over time. His first Amazon shareholder letter in 1997 registered at a tenth-grade level (comparable to The New York Times). Over the next decade, 85% of his letters were written for an eighth- or ninth-grade level.

For example, in 2007, Bezos explained the benefits of Amazon’s newly introduced Kindle in a paragraph a seventh grader could understand:

If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

Bezos chose short words to talk about hard things. When you make things simple, you’re not dumbing down the content. You’re outsmarting the competition.

2. Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts. 

A metaphor is a powerful tool that compares abstract ideas to familiar concepts. Metaphors bring people on a journey without ever leaving their seats. Chris Hadfield, a famous Canadian astronaut, is a talented speaker and TED Talks star who tapped into the power of metaphor to describe an indescribable event:

Six seconds before launch, suddenly, this beast starts roaring like a dragon starting to breathe fire. You’re like a little leaf in a hurricane…As those engines light, you feel like you’re in the jaws of an enormous dog that is shaking you and physically pummeling you with power.

Roaring beasts, leaves in a hurricane, the jaws of a dog — these are all concrete ideas to describe an event that few of us will ever experience.

In business, metaphors are shortcuts to communicating complex information in short, catchy phrases. Warren Buffett understands the power of metaphor. If you watch business news or follow the stock market, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “moats and castles” attributed to companies that dominate an industry that’s difficult for competitors to enter. Buffett popularized the phrase at a 1995 Berkshire Hathaway meeting when he said, “The most important thing we do is to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle.”

The castle metaphor is a concise shortcut, a vivid explanation for a complex system of data and information that Buffett and his team use to evaluate potential investments.

When you introduce a new or abstract idea, your audience will automatically search for something familiar to help them make sense of it. Introduce a novel metaphor and beat them to the punch.

3. Humanize data to create value.

The trick to reducing cognitive load and making any data point interesting is to humanize it by placing the number in perspective. Showing them PowerPoint slides with statistics and charts only adds cognitive weight, draining their mental energy.

Any time you introduce numbers, take the extra step to make them engaging, memorable, and, ultimately, persuasive.

For example, by 2025 scientists expect humans to produce 175 zettabytes of data annually, or one trillion gigabytes. It’s simply too big a number for most people to wrap their minds around. But what if I said that if you could store 175 zettabytes of data on DVDs, the disks would circle the earth 222 times? It’s still a big number, but the description is more engaging because it paints a vivid image in your mind’s eye.

Famed astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson once told me that the secret to science communication is to “embed the concept in familiar ground.” In other words, turn data into language mere humans can understand.

One of Tyson’s famous examples of humanizing data occurred in 1997 when NASA launched the Cassini space probe to explore Saturn. Skeptics questioned its $3 billion price tag, and so Tyson appeared on television talk shows to educate the public on the benefits of the mission. But first, he had to deal with the price shock, so he pulled a data comparison out of his rhetorical toolbelt. He explained that the $3 billion would be spread over eight years. He added that Americans spend more on lip balm every year than NASA would spend on the mission over that timeline.

To demonstrate the value of your idea, humanize data and make it relevant to your listeners.

4. Make mission your mantra to align teams.

In 1957, a power outage knocked out electricity to large parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Earl Bakken, a medical device repairman working in his garage, saw an opportunity to create innovations in the field. So he built the first battery-powered pacemaker that kept working even when the power went out.

At that moment, Bakken’s life took on a purpose beyond just fixing things. He was on a mission to “alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.”

Bakken passed away in 2018, more than 50 years after founding Medtronic. The company has changed considerably since then. Its 90,000 employees work across 150 countries and its therapies touch the lives of two patients every second. But while much has changed, one thing has stayed the same: Medtronic’s employees are driven by the same six words that inspired Bakken: alleviate pain, restore health, extend life.

Bakken was a “repeater in chief,” constantly keeping the company’s mission front and center. Shortly before Bakken passed away at the age of 94, he recorded a video for employees. He repeated the company’s mission and made one request: “I ask you to live by it every day.”

A mission statement that’s tucked in a drawer and largely forgotten does little to align teams around a common purpose. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter found that most leaders under-communicate their vision by a factor of 10. “Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices,” Kotter writes.

Transformational leaders overcommunicate. They repeat the mission so often, it becomes a mantra. A mantra is a statement or slogan that builds in strength as it’s repeated. Overcommunication fuels its impact. Your mission should take center stage. Shine a spotlight on your company’s purpose across communication channels: memos, emails, presentations, social media, and marketing material. If your mission stands for something, then stand up for it.

. . .

Anything worth accomplishing takes the work of a team, a group of people dedicated to the passionate pursuit of a dream, a common vision. While some teams follow leaders who are granted power through sheer title alone, the most successful teams follow leaders because they are inspired to do so.

According to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, villagers would come from far and wide to hear Abraham Lincoln, then a prairie lawyer with a gift for storytelling. Lincoln didn’t have the benefit of modern technology. He stood on a tree stump instead of a TED stage, and PowerPoint wouldn’t be invented for another 130 years. And yet Lincoln “could simultaneously educate, entertain, and move his audiences,” writes Goodwin.

While the tools of communication have changed since Lincoln regaled crowds with his storytelling techniques, the human brain has not. Our minds are wired for story. We think in narrative and enjoy consuming content in story form.

Understanding the difference between presenting and storytelling is critical to a leader’s ability to engage an audience and move them to action. Unfortunately, presentation software often gets in the way. Slides should be designed to complement a story, not to replace the storyteller.

Following are five storytelling strategies to help you stand out the next time you give a presentation.

Presenters open PowerPoint. Storytellers craft a narrative.

If you want to engage your audience, you have to tell a story. But for most people who prepare presentations, storytelling is not top of mind.

Most “presenters” do what sounds logical: They begin by opening the slideware. But most presentation programs aren’t storytelling tools. They’re digital delivery mechanisms. PowerPoint’s default template asks for a title and text.

A bulleted list is not a story. A story is a connected series of events told through words and/or pictures. A story has a theme, attention-grabbing moments, heroes and villains, and a satisfying conclusion. Nicely designed slides cannot compensate for a poorly structured story.

Award-winning movie directors read or write the story before picking up a camera. They see the movie play out by sketching or drawing each scene on storyboards. In much the same way, effective presenters think through the elements of their content long before they open PowerPoint.

Before you sit down to create your slides, try this three-step process. First, write down your idea as if you were telling someone a story. Since you don’t naturally write or speak in bullet points, avoid them. Instead, use complete sentences with nouns, verbs, and transitions between paragraphs and ideas. Second, visualize each of your main concepts by “storyboarding”: sketching ideas on a whiteboard or a blank sheet of paper. Finally, gather the assets that will bring your story to life: videos, animations, graphics, or photos.

Presenters use text. Storytellers love pictures.

While serving as commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield became a social media sensation by picking up a guitar and singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while floating weightless. Back on Earth, his celebrated TED Talk has attracted more than 11 million views.

Hadfield’s presentation, “What I learned from going blind in space,” was an astonishing display of visual storytelling. His PowerPoint deck contained 35 slides — with no text. Instead, Hadfield relied on pictures, images, animations, and videos to introduce the audience to a world few will ever experience.

Researchers have found that your audience will recall about 10% of the content if they simply hear information. But the “picture superiority effect” means that if they hear information and see a picture, they’ll retain 65%.

Florence Nightingale understood picture superiority more than a century before the invention of PowerPoint. Nightingale was a statistician and mathematician. She was also an empathetic nurse who was shocked to discover that more British soldiers were dying from unsanitary conditions in hospitals than were dying of battle wounds. When Nightingale sought funding from British authorities to improve conditions, she translated the dry data into a color-coded graphic. Nightingale knew that humans were moved more by stories and pictures than data and text alone.

If you want to engage an audience, build a presentation that favors pictures to complement the story you tell. A combination of images and words improves learning much more than words can do on their own.

Presenters dump data. Storytellers humanize it.

As Nightingale discovered, the human brain was not built to make sense of large numbers. Data is abstract until it’s put into context that people can understand. And people can understand people.

I once met with a group of executives at a large medical equipment company preparing to launch a new brain-scanning machine at a prestigious conference. They sent me hundreds of pages of clinical data to prove the technology could identify a patient’s condition faster and more accurately than any existing device.

“Where are the people?” I asked.

While the data provided evidence for the efficacy of the technology, it didn’t tell a story. Only humans could do that.

After a few hours of brainstorming with the executive team, we decided to put faces to the data. We built a presentation around two typical patients — David and Susan — who would benefit from the technology should they enter a hospital with symptoms of a possible stroke or heart attack.

At the same conference the following year, the executive who had delivered the presentation was walking down a hallway when a physician stopped him and said, “You’re the David and Susan guy. Great presentation.” The attendee hadn’t remembered all the data, but the story left an impression.

The next time you have large datasets to present, add a face to the statistics.

Presenters are predictable. Storytellers surprise audiences.

Most PowerPoints are boring because they’re predictable. We know what comes next — another slide of bullet points, followed by another, and another. A good story, however, has the element of surprise.

When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod, he told the audience that the music player could store 1,000 songs. While other music players on the market could make the same claim, Jobs explained that none of the competitors could fit in your pocket. And with the flair of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Jobs reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the smallest MP3 player on the market. “One thousand songs in your pocket” became one of the most iconic taglines in product history.

Although many people considered Steve Jobs one of the most outstanding business presenters of our time, the Apple co-founder knew the real secret to winning over an audience: Create a presentation that complements a well-crafted story.

The human brain pays attention to novelty — twists and turns and unexpected events. Our brain perks up when we detect something that breaks a pattern.

There’s no limit to your creativity. While you don’t need to pull products out of your pocket to grab the audience’s attention, do plan to surprise people with something they don’t expect.

Presenters practice silently. Storytellers rehearse out loud.

Most business presentations are forgettable because speakers forget they’re performing, not presenting. A great presentation informs, inspires, engages, and entertains. In other words, it’s part performance and should be rehearsed like one.

Most business professionals flip through their slides silently to prepare for a presentation. Storytellers rehearse — out loud. They practice their vocal delivery, adding perfectly-timed pauses and varying the pace of their speech. If they plan to stand in front of a group, they’ll stand during rehearsal. If they’re going to be seated in a Zoom call, they’ll take their seat in rehearsal and deliver each slide as though they’re giving the real thing.

. . .

When you see yourself as a storyteller, the presentation your audience sees will change. Don’t let presentation software get in the way of giving your audience information they’ll pay attention to — and retain.