My thoughts on Elon's response to the first "retail investor/owner" question about Tesla Service.
- I was hoping he was gonna nail it. He did not nail it. I fear he still doesn't get it.
- At least, what he announced reflects a continued lack of understanding about service issues.
- As I said last time, it's all about customer/company communication (CCC).
- Today Elon simply focused on optimizing the ability to request a service appointment.
- This is what tech startups call "low hanging fruit" -- in my opinion, in this case, fruit that's already on the ground.
- This is a baby step. Not even touching the core problems.
- And to reiterate, the core problems are managing expectations and full accountability.
- You don't achieve superb CCC without those two ingredients in the company culture.
If Elon had announced the following:
- The app tracks every step of your service experience, showing where car is now, status of it, who your point of contact is now, how to reach them with a tap of screen, when car will be ready, etc, then that would be something. I hope that's coming.
- The app lets you contact Tesla, track your communications, lets you know when you're supposed to hear back, updates you with notifications if there are delays, etc.
- On the back-end (within the corporation): system tracks all inbound and outbound communications with customer, every issue tracked, all due dates highlighted, name of employee highlighted (who owns this customer at every step of the process), who the supervisor is if things start slipping, supervisor gets alerted the second stuff slips, etc. In other words, tools to help staff manage expectations and accountability.
- Until I see that kind of thing, Tesla is not nailing it.
- In fact, what they're introducing now with the "tap a button in the app, schedule service appointment" may wind up increasing in-flow of service requests to the service centers. This risks new bottlenecks and more problems not less. They're potentially opening floodgates for inbound requests but Elon offered no information on how systems (and management!) are being improved in-house so that they can handle a larger influx of service requests.
- I still don't think Elon gets it.
- I still don't see superb CCC being in the company DNA or culture.
- I am still hoping, but I am still waiting.
The Fast Food Analogy
You know when you go into a fast food restaurant? They all have the same systems: you see these touchscreen computer monitors with pending orders. As the orders get "stale" as the seconds tick by, the background color goes from green to RED. That means the customer is waiting a long time. This is a simple way of managing customer expectations that the food really is fast, and that they can pump through many orders without a hitch. Employees and management constantly seeing the status of all pending customer orders and they can act accordingly.
Tesla needs something like that in-house, on huge scale, and then simple UI/UX reflected in the app (and mirrored in My Tesla part of website) and if they did all that, and Elon hired/fired based on management nailing new objectives for CCC success, we'd be somewhere.
Like always, Tesla, I'm happy to help. Ping me.
