This specific one is minor but it is a classic example of glitches that simply should not exist with a company full of Silicon Valley software engineers who supposedly know how to build stuff.
Fact 1. I drove 1200 miles round trip to Tempe, AZ last week to have annual service done on my 2013 S which hit 96000 miles along the way. Booked hotels etc. The proverbial Tesla service trip.
Fact 2. Mere hours before we embarked on this long road trip, I got a call from Tesla Tempe saying hey, you know, you could have a mobile service tech do all this work in your driveway locally, no need to drive to Tempe, sure you wanna come all the way out here? (Of course I didn't wanna go all the way out there!) I tell the guy, a) I was told by the mobile service tech a few months ago, while he was standing in my driveway, that the 4/8/12/etc year annual service jobs required lifts etc and had to be done at a Tesla service center, so I assumed that was still the case and b) you should have told me earlier because c) we booked our hotels and we can't cancel the hotel reservations at this late date, so we have no choice but to do the trip.
Fact 3. We do the trip, Tesla does the service, we get home. On Feb 25th I get an email from Tesla regarding a "Lift Gate Plug Bulletin" which is some sort of technical bulletin for warranty work on my S's lift gate plugs. Email says I should schedule a mobile service tech guy to come to the house and do this warranty work on my car.
Question: Why didn't they just do this last week in Tempe? Why didn't this show up on the computer record for my car then? Why didn't anyone tell me? It would have saved them and me both time, no?
Fact 4: When one gets one of these emails saying one needs service, they tell you, please use our handy self-scheduling tool by clicking on a link and selecting a convenient date for the techie to come out to your house and do the work. Okay, so I click on the link to schedule the work. First thing it asks for is my address. Because I am now on Routezilla's website, not Tesla's, and clearly Routezilla and Tesla don't have a sufficient API flexibility for Tesla to pass personally identifiable information to Routezilla (or can't because of privacy policy reasons), it instead has to ask you to enter your street, city, state, and zip, oh, and also the last 6 digits of your VIN -- all information that Tesla already has and could, if it really wanted to, pre-populate into these web form fields so that customers don't have to re-type that data in every time they use the tool (I've had to use it 3 times in the past few months). It's a minor annoyance, nothing more, but it reflects the kind of "duh" design decision Tesla should have made but didn't.
Fact 5: So I get past the address/VIN form to the next page of the form which asks you to "Click on the day you would like service" but I discover that every single calendar date for the next fricking six months is booked. Here's the screen shot:
The "Sorry we're all booked up this month" message in the blue area shown above exists for March, April, May, June, July, and August of 2019.
All of this is minor. But little minor annoyances become big problems when lots and lots of customers encounter them. Think of what I have to do at this point: email Tesla back, wait about a week for them to respond (if they ever do), letting them know their Routezilla is broken. I could try to call but nobody ever answers. Imagine thousands of customers now having to go through the same process. Little failures scale into big failures on Tesla's end. Which translates into a lot of wasted time on Tesla's end trying to fix this and do a lot of busy work to get back to everyone and of course, they'll drop the ball and fail to get back to some customers (maybe all, who knows), and customers will be like, why doesn't Tesla ever respond, and the cycle of failed customer/company communications (CCC) at Tesla continues.
C'mon Tesla.
Fact 1. I drove 1200 miles round trip to Tempe, AZ last week to have annual service done on my 2013 S which hit 96000 miles along the way. Booked hotels etc. The proverbial Tesla service trip.
Fact 2. Mere hours before we embarked on this long road trip, I got a call from Tesla Tempe saying hey, you know, you could have a mobile service tech do all this work in your driveway locally, no need to drive to Tempe, sure you wanna come all the way out here? (Of course I didn't wanna go all the way out there!) I tell the guy, a) I was told by the mobile service tech a few months ago, while he was standing in my driveway, that the 4/8/12/etc year annual service jobs required lifts etc and had to be done at a Tesla service center, so I assumed that was still the case and b) you should have told me earlier because c) we booked our hotels and we can't cancel the hotel reservations at this late date, so we have no choice but to do the trip.
Fact 3. We do the trip, Tesla does the service, we get home. On Feb 25th I get an email from Tesla regarding a "Lift Gate Plug Bulletin" which is some sort of technical bulletin for warranty work on my S's lift gate plugs. Email says I should schedule a mobile service tech guy to come to the house and do this warranty work on my car.
Question: Why didn't they just do this last week in Tempe? Why didn't this show up on the computer record for my car then? Why didn't anyone tell me? It would have saved them and me both time, no?
Fact 4: When one gets one of these emails saying one needs service, they tell you, please use our handy self-scheduling tool by clicking on a link and selecting a convenient date for the techie to come out to your house and do the work. Okay, so I click on the link to schedule the work. First thing it asks for is my address. Because I am now on Routezilla's website, not Tesla's, and clearly Routezilla and Tesla don't have a sufficient API flexibility for Tesla to pass personally identifiable information to Routezilla (or can't because of privacy policy reasons), it instead has to ask you to enter your street, city, state, and zip, oh, and also the last 6 digits of your VIN -- all information that Tesla already has and could, if it really wanted to, pre-populate into these web form fields so that customers don't have to re-type that data in every time they use the tool (I've had to use it 3 times in the past few months). It's a minor annoyance, nothing more, but it reflects the kind of "duh" design decision Tesla should have made but didn't.
Fact 5: So I get past the address/VIN form to the next page of the form which asks you to "Click on the day you would like service" but I discover that every single calendar date for the next fricking six months is booked. Here's the screen shot:
The "Sorry we're all booked up this month" message in the blue area shown above exists for March, April, May, June, July, and August of 2019.
All of this is minor. But little minor annoyances become big problems when lots and lots of customers encounter them. Think of what I have to do at this point: email Tesla back, wait about a week for them to respond (if they ever do), letting them know their Routezilla is broken. I could try to call but nobody ever answers. Imagine thousands of customers now having to go through the same process. Little failures scale into big failures on Tesla's end. Which translates into a lot of wasted time on Tesla's end trying to fix this and do a lot of busy work to get back to everyone and of course, they'll drop the ball and fail to get back to some customers (maybe all, who knows), and customers will be like, why doesn't Tesla ever respond, and the cycle of failed customer/company communications (CCC) at Tesla continues.
C'mon Tesla.
