As I have been saying for months, Tesla's biggest ongoing problem is they're klutzes at communication. They lack the empathy, sensitivity, leadership, creativity, discretion, humor, accountability, and plain old good sense when it comes to the corporate bureaucracy communicating to the outside world. They lack the imagination to do wonders with technology -- to integrate it creatively into the car, into the TM website's My Tesla section, and into the mobile apps -- to make the communications between company and customer as wonderful as the car itself. They have not shown any consistent understanding of the importance of managing expectations. This leads to customer confusion, customer disappointment. A disappointed customer is the worst thing a company can have. Especially in the social media, always-on internet age. Of ALL companies Tesla should understand this. They do not. Or they do, but they haven't made it a priority. It reflects poorly on management, and management is sorely responsible for these screwups.
As I have also been saying for months, ALL of this is fixable. It takes management recognizing and admitting there is a problem, understanding the urgency of correcting the problem, finding competent people who know how to fix the problem in terms of process, people, and IT infrastructure, trusting them to be turned loose to make the changes, and making it clear to the whole company this is how things will be done from now on: each employee whose job outwardly faces the customer world needs to be accountable. Systems need to be put in place, and quality assurance tests done and verified, that when the company communicates out to the world, the message is correct, the appropriate recipients receive the message, inappropriate recipients do not by accident receive the message, and things just WORK.
This is not Tesla today. It NEEDS to be Tesla soon or the company will be in a world of hurt come mass deployment of the X and the 3.
