There's not really an excuse for what has happened. I think it was Now You Know who pointed out that Elon, in his shareholder meeting, when pointing out his main focuses didn't include customer service in that list. This concerned them, and you don't find many who are more of a Tesla fanboy than those two.
Customer Service was headed up back in the day by JB Straubel I believe? Whoever it was, it clearly worked at that level pretty well. Obviously they have a lot more customers now. Jon McNeill was supposed to have made things easier by adding an
Executive Escalation option to the MyTesla account back in 2017. Did it work?
Does it
actually work? I've read enough accounts on here to wonder.
Statistics!
Now obviously people who have a nice simple process of pick car, buy car, car delivered aren't going to be complaining. People who buy other ways but get a car with no issues are also not going to complain either. That's a big chunk of purchasers but only because they didn't vary from the easy path, and they were lucky.
It's good in that most people seem to have no problems. But how unproblematic are they really? The manufacturing must've improved enough that things don't happen to cause problems that require good customer service. However it's also worth saying that not everyone is going to reverse their car into a wall, or get hit by another driver today. So there are
complainees in potentia that perhaps are not yet realised, due to their currently fortunate circumstances. How big of a number could that be? As the company sells more cars to more people, how much more does the employee to customer ratio dynamic change?
As an aside my friend reversed their second hand inventory Model X into a wall earlier this year. It replaced a Mitsubishi PHEV but otherwise they're not fans of electric for anything other than cost-effective motoring. Certainly not fans of Tesla per se. Suffice to say that getting hold of a new bumper took an amount of weeks that was measured in months, which they weren't impressed with. They like the car, but they didn't like the wait.
Back to stats. What if you don't take the easy 'buy a new car off the website' path. Now our chances of having to interact more with actual Tesla staff who have to
do things increases. This isn't a single 'your car will be delivered on x date' email job (although I've seen even that fail a few times). What percentage of these inventory car sales have complaints? Is it significantly large comparatively? Does the level of issues rise concomitantly with the amount of involvement with Tesla employees? This is the crux of the argument, I feel.
I don't think it even has to be a large percentage that goes wrong. But if a significant enough percentage of these highly involved transactions is going wrong then you have a major customer services problem; because a vocal minority can become a major PR issue. People talk about their cars. That talk is selling Teslas right now, but it can also unsell Teslas if there are enough voices clamouring about sales and service issues.
Does this happen with other manufacturers? Of course it does. Some models from certain brands are a veritable money pit when it comes to untraceable gremlins and the dealers/network are a nightmare to work with (*cough* Ford Kuga *cough*). But they sell so many cars to so many people that those few get drowned out in the noise. Tesla doesn't have the figures to be able to ignore even a smallish percentage of unsatisfied customers.
And I don't get it. This is a guy who pushes his engineers to greater and newer heights. So why not push customer service that way too? Perhaps he just doesn't understand it well enough. Perhaps he doesn't cognate that way. Maybe he can't let go enough to allow someone else who does do customer service well to have the freedom to get the job done.
Letting go is hard. But strangling yourself is far worse.