Let's try a little first-principles thinking.
For starters:
- What thrilled me about watching the FSD webcast yesterday was the discovery that there are teams within Tesla that are obsessed with learning and good uninterrupted communications -- hooray!
- Elon is deeply involved with these teams -- excellent!
- The essence of Neural Nets is learning, based on massive ingests of data which is then fine-tuned and tweaked.
- These teams have brilliantly seeded nearly the entire multi-hundred-thousand-car Tesla fleet with the ability to tell the mothership what's going on out on the road -- massive competitive advantage.
- Tesla's FSD/AI teams obsess over the fleet sending back data on driver interventions, which arguably are failures of the car to do something right on its own while in autonomous mode
- By having teams of annotators who go in, study the videos of what the car was doing when a driver intervened, and essentially teach the neural net how to do it right on its own, the NN learns, you avoid those types of interventions in the future
- The result is a smarter, SAFER self-driving car, arguably leaps and bounds above any competitor for years to come
Okay, now imagine if Tesla approached its currently-so-so
Company/Customer Communications (CCC) with the same level of obsession and passion. Imagine if Tesla realized that:
- Every http request on the Tesla website is a customer intervention.
- Every tap of a button in the Tesla app is a customer intervention.
- Every visit to a store is a customer intervention.
- Every order by a customer is a customer intervention.
- Every email, phone call, text, etc. from a customer to an order specialist is a customer intervention.
- Every call to the trucker asking when the car will be delivered is a customer intervention.
- Every call to Tesla Roadside Service is a customer intervention.
- Every repair situation is a customer intervention.
- Every time a customer calls a service center to find out the status of their car: it's a customer intervention.
- Every inquiry from a customer, from email, phone, text, in-person, whatever, all day long, 24/7/365: it's a customer intervention.
- Every time a customer hangs up in frustration after being on hold for 30, 60, 90 minutes and not getting anywhere, it's a customer intervention.
- Every time you try the VIP/executive "escalation" feature to get a response from Tesla, it's a customer intervention.
- Every customer intervention is just as important, just as valuable (arguably moreso) than a driver intervention.
Now think about Tesla's corporate culture as just another neural net. One that right now is very dumb and running on the equivalent of a Pentium chip from 1994 with 16MB RAM.
If you consider all the times a customer attempts to "intervene" with Tesla, especially when Tesla's been nonresponsive/noncommunicative, you realize how effed up the company still is from the customer experience perspective. Sure, lots of you out there have great, satisfied experiences. I get it. Especially if you live in California. Lots of other places, not so much. Some are downright horrible experiences.
Compare the standardized homogeneity of the FSD universe in Tesla cars with the heterogeneity of Tesla's corporate culture in terms of CCC. Compare what Tesla can and will achieve with the exact same constantly-improving neural net downloaded into its entire fleet of cars, with the random/uneven experiences customers have with Tesla company interactions around the country/world. Everything in the latter case depends on the initiative/dedication/training/attitude/skills of the individual Tesla person you interact with. Get a good one, great. Get a so-so one, awful. (Imagine if some Tesla cars were just stupid and never "learned". Imagine if the fleet had tons of such cars in it.) Problem is, in the customer experience world, you deal with multiple Tesla employees. Customer issues are handed off to multiple people. Maybe the first one you deal with is great. Next one you're handed off to, not so great. One after that, great. Then you're assigned a total dud. And the dud is the most important one in the chain, and you never get an email reply or phone call reply from them. Ever. (That's my general experience.) Poorly managed expectations. Frustrated,
exasperated customers. Fail.
Imagine in FSD division of the company, they discovered the driver intervention-count stayed high, perpetually. Elon would freak out, wonder WTF they were doing wrong, maybe heads would roll. But imagine what the customer intervention count is with Tesla every day. Who's minding that count, Elon? Who's obsessing about getting it to zero? Or think of it this way, where is the "March of Nines" for customer experience? How do we get to 99.9999999% blissful customer experiences?
So, let's fix this puppy. Imagine applying some first-principle thinking Elon-style to CCC.
- Imagine every single Tesla owner, every one, including every would-be/wannabe future owner, those who are thinking about buying: they're all part of *the Tesla market*.
- Think of the Tesla Market as just another fleet.
- Tesla, you own this fleet too. But you're not doing much with it right now. Not efficiently anyway. Show it some love.
- Imagine every time there is a customer intervention, Tesla studies it just as obsessively as FSD driver interventions.
- Imagine every time there is a customer intervention, someone on this CCC "annotation team" studies why the customer intervened, and figures out how the company can avoid doing whatever it did that let to poorly managed expectations, unresponsiveness, 60+ minute on-hold experiences on the phone, etc., in the future, and feeds that back into the company DNA -- which one should think of as just another neural net, that is desperately eager to learn but is being starved of data.
- Imagine how many customer interventions happen every day.
- Imagine all the "annotations" Tesla would be faced with if they obsessed over them. Every day. It'd be a lot.
- But over time the onslaught would drop fast--why, I would bet exponentially.
- Imagine how fast they could cut down on the failures that triggered a customer intervention in the first place.
- The Tesla corporate culture "neural net" needs training now how to improve, by new management practices, standards of accountability, and new technologies and business practices installed wherever they're needed most, to streamline/improve communications and responsiveness and overall customer experience.
- The lack of accountability and the mismanaged expectations are what are triggering so much frustration on the customer side. Consider customer frustration or disappointment no different than a car operating under FSD having an accident.
There is a way to FIX the CCC problem at Tesla. So that the owner experience is as good, as brilliant, as game-changing, and as far out in the lead as the technology, the cars, and the software. THAT is what Tesla SHOULD BE. Tesla as a brand should mean EVERYTHING--products, ordering, service, app, the whole lifecycle of a customer, is way beyond every other automaker. You would have loyalty like you would not believe. Tesla's CCC experience is holding the company back from achieving this.
C'mon Tesla. You have to fix this. You have no choice. If you're betting the farm on a robotaxi future, face the reality: you have no robotaxi future if the customer experience of the robotaxi service sucks. And
if you do nothing in the next 12-18 months, and launch the Tesla Network with today's CCC, the robotaxi service will suck, from a car-owner perspective and a passenger pespective. And you lose. We all lose.
Like Elon said yesterday about LIDAR: "Lame. Lame."
Don't be lame, Tesla.
