Ostrichsak
Well-Known Member
Not really. Back when customer service was superb, the ratio of cars to service centers was probably much better in your area. The number of service centers haven’t kept pace with the number of cars on the road. How many service centers would be needed to keep that same ratio in your area along with expanding everywhere else? That would take major investment. And way back when, how did they get that money to setup that service center? If they weren’t making a penny, they had to get the money from borrowing/capital raise I would think.
Anyway...it doesn’t matter. I think we can both agree that Tesla does need more service centers in some extremely busy markets and should bring back the direct phone option.
We do actually agree on several points but just disagree on the "why" of said points.
We both agree 100% that they should have ramped up customer service resources to more closely match the growth curve of sales. They did not. Not even remotely close in fact. What we're not in agreement with is "why" they didn't and I think it's a difficult conclusion to arrive at to say that they just didn't expect they would need customer service for all of those new sales for such a forward thinking company that seemingly is 7 steps ahead of everyone else in much more complex issues.
This oversight or (most likely) decision was also during a time they were trying to increase profitability ahead of schedule in an effort to make Wall Street investors happy. I'm assigning blame where the data supports it rather than simply saying that they just didn't know or because they didn't have the profit to pay for it. Did you see their profit numbers when they had good customer service? What about the last couple of years when they've been profitable while customer service is rapidly deteriorating? You can't have that kind of profit margin as an upstart when your customer service support is a nightmare all over the country. It's not actually profit if you're robbing Peter (the customer) to pay Paul (investors).
We also both agree that they need more service centers, better staffing of existing service centers (maybe not in that particular order, either) and to answer the phones again. This lack of customer service feels a lot more like a victim of not caring about the problem rather than not being able to solve the issue. If they truly cared about the problem they'd start with simply taking phone calls again until they work the kinks out of their "future" service solution plans.