The Uselessness of Corporate Apologies

“Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Most of us have seen and heard this statement countless times, whenever a company fails to provide a promised or expected product or service. And recently, I heard it too.

One evening, around 8 PM, I used the complimentary teleconsultation service provided by my health insurance company to consult a doctor and obtain a prescription. The consultation itself went smoothly, but what followed became an example of how technology and customer service can fail precisely when they are needed most.

After the consultation ended, I waited for the prescription to arrive. Thirty minutes passed, yet there was still no sign of it. Deciding to seek assistance, I tried contacting customer support through the app’s help section itself, but it was broke. Reaching a human representative turned out to be a challenge in itself. It took three attempts, nearly ten minutes of navigating automated menus, and repeated interactions with an intelligent AI chatbot before I was finally able to speak to a person.

Once connected, I explained the issue. The representative informed me that prescriptions could take up to four hours to be delivered. Hearing this, I asked a simple question: if the prescription arrived four hours later, i.e. around midnight, how exactly was I supposed to purchase the prescribed medicines? His response was as predictable as it was unhelpful. He explained that this is the maximum time the system takes to process and that it is the company policy, that he could do nothing beyond it, and that he would raise a request to have the prescription processed sooner.

I then asked why support through the company’s app was unavailable. The answer was that app-based assistance operated only between 8 AM and 8 PM. Naturally, I wanted to know why such a limitation existed for a service related to healthcare. Once again, the explanation was identical: “It is company policy.”

The conversation left me frustrated and exhausted, with the distinct impression that policies have become a substitute for solutions. Every question was met with a scripted response, as though the purpose of customer support was no longer to resolve problems but to explain why resolution was impossible.

And the story did not end there. The promised prescription failed to arrive within four hours. In fact, it did not arrive even after twenty-four hours had passed. By then, I was too tired to call again, only to hear another round of rehearsed explanations and policy-driven justifications.

What struck me most was the complete absence of accountability. The representative I spoke to faced no consequences if the issue remained unresolved. If I were to call again, I would almost certainly be connected to a different executive, someone with no knowledge of the previous conversation. I would be expected to explain the entire situation from the beginning, repeating my frustration while navigating the same process once more. The odds of receiving a genuine solution seemed far lower than the odds of receiving yet another scripted response.

What makes this experience particularly troubling is that it was not an isolated incident. Similar encounters have become increasingly common across many modern businesses, especially in sectors such as e-commerce, quick commerce, insurance, and other technology-driven services. These companies often promote convenience, speed, and customer-centricity as their defining strengths. Yet when something goes wrong, customers frequently find themselves trapped in a maze of automated systems, rigid policies, and fragmented support structures where nobody owns the problem and nobody is truly accountable for solving it. In the pursuit of efficiency and scale, many organizations appear to have optimized away the very thing customers value most during a problem: the assurance that someone is personally responsible for helping them. The result is a strange paradox of modern service. Companies have become faster than ever at acquiring customers, but increasingly ineffective at supporting them when they need help the most.