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Presumably only by observing a company over time: does their behaviour change? Have they kept their promises for how they're going to fix it?

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I guess that would apply equally to companies who botched their statement of apology but actually took a lot of steps to improve things.

The point is that over time this makes the apology itself moot.

An excellent point... but to be honest, if every company reacted like this when they screwed up it wouldn't actually be a bad thing :-)

It would if it was just a rote statement that they hadn't thought about.

A bit like the call centers which effusively state "I'd be more than happy to help you with that" after each thing you say to them.

I don't think they can do rote statements. They have to explain what caused the problem, explain what they are going to do to prevent the issue occuring again and admit that they cocked up. Nothing really very rote about that!

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