During my many years of executive management, in the luxury vertical of the hospitality industry, I realized that excuses have become one of the best shelters for avoiding responsibility. Various circumstances beget various and purportedly felicitous excuses. It’s a contagious virus known as ‘excuseitis’. And this is a real plague for any company’s productivity.

I have heard so many excuses thus I resorted to maintaining a log that I methodically compiled in alphabetical order, thus the same excuses may not be used more than once. The log was used for the members of the staff and chiefly for those in supervisory positions. After a while, I started noticing significant ‘remission’ and perhaps ‘cure’ for the pestilent “excuseitis”.

Excuses are only meant to deflect the responsibility thereby aiding the ‘user’ to pointing fingers to someone or something else .

Let’s take a look from a different perspective; we all work in some sort of service industry and we need to consistently please our customers.

Question; would our customer be satisfied with poor or mediocre services just because we saturated him/her with an avalanche of excuses? Aren’t at times excuses sort of euphemism for sheer ‘lies’?

And let’s don’t fool ourselves; If the customer accepts the ‘excuses’ for flawed service in lieu of sincere apology and solemn promise of remedy and ensuing amendments, would that secure his/her loyalty or engagement for our business? I doubt it…

Customers expect service providers to be straightforward and to assume responsibility for the actions.

It is very easy to satisfy customers; service, quality, integrity. Yes, Service first because it trumps quality.

Highly recommend reading “Excuses Begone!” by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.