I have a theory what happened to customer service and submitting work request. You are welcome to comment, but here's what I think.
I’m not trying to defend the current customer service environment, but trying to make sense out of what I am seeing.
We often see that Tesla doesn’t announce procedure changes. Many times we learn that they are doing business different when we read articles on Electrek, InsideEVs, Teslarati and Green Car Reports.
A couple of years ago, all we heard on the forums is how “I called Tesla and asked how to reboot the car.” I called Tesla and asked “how to get the door handles to present”. I called Tesla and asked “how do I get the change the battery in my fob”. I called Tesla and asked what tire pressure should be”. “I called customer support and spent two hours on the phone talking to a tech”. Reading many of these postings were compliments about how they got help with such petty questions. Don't get me wrong. Lots of those reports were for serious issues. But when many of the calls are for the simplest things, that's what the managers remember not the serious stuff. (No body read the manual. (You know I don't really mean -nobody.) Few read the manuals these days – so it appears.)
Did we burn our bridges? Did so many people call with such minor, insignificant questions that they literally ruined it for those later customers? (Of course none of those calls were from you or me, but somebody else.) Did Tesla quietly just move all those call takers to do something more productive inside the company? Is Tesla leaving the “dumb” stuff for someone else to answer - maybe we dedicated owners that enjoy talking about Tesla?” Of course the real downside is, anyone with a serious problem is drowning in the same pool without answers”.
It used to be that we could submit a trouble ticket request via our Tesla account at Tesla.com. That’s gone. We used to see upgrade and warranty purchase offerings regularly under our accounts. That is gone in many cases. Now we see in the Tesla app, we can submit trouble requests, roadside assistance request, and available upgrades are beginning to show up. So, it looks like they are quietly moving us to app based requests and away from web based requests.
I think that Tesla did this to wean those people off calling over every little thing. They spoiled us with service and spending so much time on the phone with so many little things, that they weighed the cost of doing so and killed it to save money.
Something happened to cause this. I am just guessing what I think. You are welcome to disagree with me, I don't mind. But what are your ideas regarding why they changed the way they were doing business to what they are doing now.
