It’s still awful though. I would hesitate to do business with a company that doesn’t take any responsibility for their own products.
That's more offensive and insulting and time-wasting than saying nothing.
Not apologised at all comes off better than a backhanded apology IMO.
But the below isn't correct:
> Right, so the company is saying "I will never acknowledge our mistakes because if I do we might have to fix them."
I probably didn't word it perfectly in my original comment, but the company did acknowledge mistakes quite often after assessments of the claimed faulty/broken/whatever product (roughly 30% of faulty claims were approved and either repaired or reimbursed from memory). The rejected claims were often taken to court (like 15%) due to the value of products.
I was mostly commenting on the deception of only allowing pseudo-apologies.
Yeah, it's always a tradeoff.
I worked at a non-tech fortune 500 for a few years and was able to see the inside of repair/warranty/disputes. These were very high ticket items and the brand was/is very highly regarded for after sales support.
In the employee handbook for repair support staff (the people communicating with clients about the status of their repair/claim) there was a passage similar to the below:
"Apologies MUST NOT acknowledge anything other than the customer's explicit feelings without written acknowledgment of fault from $MANAGER".
I asked a member of that team to decipher WTF that meant, and they showed me an example email. They were only allowed to apologise in the below way:
"Hi bob, we're sorry you feel our product is faulty".
I always found these weasel apologies infuriating in my personal life.