Jon McNeill, Tesla’s President of Global Sales and Services, has responded on the TMC forum to concerns and complaints over service delays in certified third-party repair shops. Notably, McNeill said Tesla will add 300 approved body shops in the next few weeks, and will “eliminate” underperforming body shops.
McNeill posted on a discussion about a blog post written for The Motley Fool from an owner who said his Tesla sat in a certified third-party body shop for seven months because of difficulty securing parts for the job.
“Tesla owners will get the service they expect from us – period,” McNeill wrote.
See the full text below:
Hi everyone –
This week, the service team hit a global customer service satisfaction record. The team has done a fantastic job on what we control currently: our own service centers. We’re now turning our efforts on the centers we don’t control: accident repairs in body shops.
The body shop in the OP article did not begin repairs on the car for three months and then ordered more than 90 parts and took over seven months to repair the car. Neither of those are indicators of competence. To top it off, they blamed their performance on Tesla. We know from complaints that the body shop experience needs to get a lot better – and fast.
What the service team has done so far is a roadmap of how we’re going to fix the autobody experience. Wait times for appointments measured in hours and a handful of days currently. We’re providing same-day service from the Bay Area to Oslo and everywhere in between. In fact, almost 20% of jobs in our flagship center in Palo Alto are handled before the customer can finish their cup of coffee (yes, you read that correctly).
Thankfully, only a handful of our owners experience accidents each year. Since customers schedule and interface with the body shops on their own, we’re largely blind to the service pace.
Most of the customer complaints about body shops mentioned parts, so we focused on this issue. To date, we’ve reduced backlog by over 80%.
Even though we reduced part wait times, we continued to dig into the body shop complaints. What we found was astounding – cars sat at body shops for weeks and sometimes months before the body shops took action and, more often than not, the body shops blaming Tesla for parts delays were the very shops that hadn’t even ordered parts or started the repair.
We are applying brute force to this immediately. We will have individuals on our team personally manage each car on behalf of our customers that are in 3rd party body shops.
We’re also going to increase our approved shop count by 300 over the next few weeks as well as eliminating poor performing shops.
If you have an issue with a shop, please PM me directly and our team will advocate and manage your repair.
Tesla owners will get the service they expect from us – period.
Thanks to the entire service team for their commitment to setting the highest standard for service in the industry,
Jon