10 ms·
“Customer support at Tesla is even worse than I claimed last time”
- kitcar 7y agoComplaint was from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb) Elon responded - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217493904297058304 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217493904297058304
- ProAm 7y agoIt's shouldn't take twitter and involvement of the CEO to get basic customer service.
- speeder 7y agoOr a complaint from a very famous person in startup circles to get people to pay attention to the expensive software issues...
- rhacker 7y agoThis is not a Tesla only problem, mind you. Most companies I've had the (dis-)pleasure of working with lately seem to be lacking in this area. It isn't until the brass steps in that a decision can be made to unlock an outcome.
- ProAm 7y agoI've heard it a lot of Telsa owners where I live. And for something that costs on avg 50k+ it shouldn't be this bad.
- api 7y agoI have a coworker who has had tons of problems with a Tesla and has had a terrible time with their support and repair services. I agree that it's becoming the norm even for higher priced products to have shit customer service.
- rhacker 7y agoI can't argue with you there. My previous Fifth Wheel RV had a sinking floor issue that took months for the manufacturer to take seriously. It required me to press the issue many times before they got me an appointment. That was a 60k purchase.
- ProAm 7y agoIm not saying Tesla is the only company that does this. RV dealers are renown for doing the same thing. That is why everyone recommends buying an RV that is 3 years old because everything should be fixed by then.
- rchaud 7y agoCustomer Service is a cost center. In that part of the funnel, there is no money to be made, only lost. Hence the rigid CSR scripts, "quality assurance" recordings, and refusal to escalate issues.
- bigwavedave 7y agoIt's not dissimilar to security in that regard. Investing in secure practices will never make money, it will only ever be a money hole like CS.
- fenwick67 7y agoAs @jordan_mcrae_ put it, "This is called blue checkmark service. Not available to regular Tesla customers"
- ryzvonusef 7y agohttp://graphics.wsj.com/elon-musk-twitter-habit-analysis/ http://graphics.wsj.com/elon-musk-twitter-habit-analysis/ He seems to reply to everyone, but I guess a blue checkmark gets more attention
- zionic 7y agoI agree. The problem is both support & IT are cost centers and first on the chopping block when budgets need to be reeled in.
- pbreit 7y agoDidn't sound very basic. "butt-purchasing" sounds like quite a stretch. And Taleb is a confirmed provocateur.
- calcifer 7y ago> And Taleb is a confirmed provocateur. Confirmed by who? When? How?
- pbreit 7y agoStuff like this: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1160560285805096960 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1160560285805096960
- ldiracdelta 7y agoJust read his books. Brilliant, but clearly incendiary.
- FireBeyond 7y agoAnd happens to love Tesla. Until he got to experience their customer service: "First day driving a @TeslaMotors. Something else! I hope I will never ever have to drive a nonelectric car." (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/897402998787330048?lang=en https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/897402998787330048?lang=e...) "There are 150K-200K car fires per annum. You take one event & an emotional statement of an actress & turn it into a statement about the safety of @Tesla. And this is 2018." (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1008365860057120770?lang=en https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1008365860057120770?lang=...) "But they can show evidence of smear campaign (there is) using my Tesla/NonTesla test." (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1018509262085996545?lang=en https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1018509262085996545?lang=...) "Tesla might not be a flawless diamond, but you could smell a smear campaign by the usual culprits, the propaganda machine for middlebrow called the New York Times, heavily compromised in its subservience to Saudi Barbaria/Oil lobbies." (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1066683244295397376?lang=en https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1066683244295397376?lang=...) The "OMG someone said something bad about Tesla, let's question their motives"/"the shorts!" reflexes need to stop.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoOTOH the involvement of the CEO is the best way to solve systemic issues. IOW customer service can & should be able to fix it for one person, but the CEO can fix it for everybody.
- rchaud 7y agoCEOs handle optics and politics first. Of course Musk is going to promise top class service to a best-selling author with a massive following. You always take care of the big swinging d's first. You relegate the rest to your minions to handle.
- ajross 7y agoSorry, how would a company implement basic customer services except at the direction of its senior managers? Musk wasn't just issuing this one refund in that tweet, he was promising to fix Tesla's customer service policies. That's his job, and he's doing it. You can argue that he did it badly in the past, but I don't see much to complain about currently.
- cs02rm0 7y agoWhen customer support resorts to justification by analogy it's not gone well.
- rchaud 7y agoThe analogy doesn't even work. If you buy a house, you own it outright. If you don't like the house, you can sell it. Can you can sell a piece of software that doesn't belong to you and can't be unbundled from the car?
- grogenaut 7y agoyou can sell the car. You can't really sell the extension to the house without selling the house unless well you live in SF and you turn it into a 5 bedroom apartment.
- rchaud 7y agoYes, and that would have worked had the CSR been dealing with a car return issue that was past the refund eligibility date. But they're talking about a piece of software that isn't critical to the car's functionality and can be refunded.
- larntz 7y agoA terrible analogy too! If it's their policy to not refund software purchases they should have a standard response to these requests.
- __s 7y agoThe better analogy for this scenario is "it's like when you make eye contact with the squeegee guy at the corner so he starts cleaning your windows with a dirty mop despite your shrill screaming & then demands you pay him or else you don't wanna know or else"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 45ure 7y ago
- lazyjones 7y agoSurprisingly, Tesla hasn't optimized the processes for handling rare errors that affect 5 out of every 100,000 customers.
- Proven 7y agoRight - Tony Stark's AI algos are prioritizing and optimizing customer service 24 x 7
- crooked-v 7y agoWanting a refund within a reasonable grace period ("immediately afterwards" definitely counts) isn't a 'rare error', even if the purchase itself could be considered such.
- OJFord 7y agoIn the UK it's a statutory right - with digital downloads you have 14 days to either cancel for a refund or explicitly consent (i.e. opt-in, not out).
- the_duke 7y agoIt's not just digital goods. In the EU all "distance selling" purchases (internet, phone) must be fully refundable within 14 days of taking delivery. The seller may only charge for incurred costs, like shipping.
- mstade 7y agoThe exception to this is customized goods, say for example a custom made piece of furniture or jewelry. I think even stuff like engraving counts as custom made.
- OJFord 7y agoI know, but the 14 days 'cancelling' or 'consenting' part of my comment was specific to digital. The old distance selling act was actually 30 days receipt, aimed at mail order physical goods, but I'm not sure off-hand if physical goods still get longer.
- Symbiote 7y agoWhat software does Tesla sell that costs $4000?
- crooked-v 7y agoThere are several software-unlock 'upgrades' they sell, like the $2000 'boost mode' [1]. [1]: https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a30294938/tesla-model-3-acceleration-boost-upgrade/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a30294938/tesla-model-...
- kossTKR 7y agoWow that just made med like Tesla a lot less. I know it's "just business" and all that but several thousand dollars for "unlockables" reminds of the way gaming has taken a turn for the worse.
- rexer 7y agoI never understood this. If you want the latest tech, you should be expected to pay your share of the the R&D/materials that went into creating it.
- toss1 7y agoThe problem is not so much paying for the tech that you want, but the ability to reverse accidental or unintentional purchases. It is not like the customer accidentally hit a button that burned up $4K of electricity; it is a digital enable code that could be just as easily disabled. Even if they add some trivial service charge for reversing the transaction, or 1/1000 of the cost (because you had access to the fun feature for a day out of the 1000day expected lifetime), fine, but just stonewalling on an obviously reversible event is tantamount to dishonest dealing
- tbabb 7y agoTiered pricing is a standard way to allow more price-conscious customers to get the product, while still charging higher prices to those who are willing to pay for the best features. A big fraction of product cost is the overhead of setting up the manufacturing pipeline, so often the product tiers will be very small or even software changes to the exact same object. This doesn't strike me as unfair. It's helped me recently, when I bought the lowest tier iPad pro (I don't care about storage or built-in cellular, and I want the smallest one). If someone wants to pay more for those things, let them. If it came full-price with all those features bundled, I simply wouldn't have bought it at all.
- lhnz 7y agoThere needs to be a process within customer support teams in which they can escalate problems if the rules feel wrong to them. If a purchase was unintentional and very large ($4,333) a refund should be offered. This feels like common sense to me. That's a large amount of money to lose. Providing annoyingly bad customer service to people and then signing off with "Warm Regards" is likely to make enemies of customers. Edit: Somebody mentioned that Taleb might be bullshiting about there being no confirmation, however, to be honest, I still think at this price level, customer support should be able to refund purchases. Keep your customers happy (and they will eventually purchase upgrades from you)!
- crooked-v 7y agoAlso, Tesla upgrades are universally either software unlocks ("boost mode") or promises of future hardware/software upgrades ("full self driving"), as far as I know, and so should all be entirely reversible in an automated way. I think of Apple, Microsoft, and Steam for comparison, each of which have software stores that allow refunds for purchases, some of which could potentially be pretty significant. For example, Train Simulator has about $10,000 in DLC [1], and a single bundle purchase of all of it would still qualify for Steam's two-weeks-from-purchase/less-than-two-hours-of-play refund policy. [1]: https://ganker.com/train-simulator-game-all-dlc-total-cost-almost-10000-usd/ https://ganker.com/train-simulator-game-all-dlc-total-cost-a...
- filoleg 7y agoNitpick: while I agree that “full self driving” is kind of a promise and that all those charges should be reversible, you still get immediate feature unlocks today immediately after paying for it, like navigate on autopilot/smart summon.
- crooked-v 7y ago> you still get immediate feature unlocks today So... turn those off again, then.
- 7y ago
- andybak 7y agoCan anyone confirm it's this easy to make the purchase? I'd rather enjoy discovering that Nicholas Taleb was bullshitting here...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- filoleg 7y agoIt isn’t. I was trying to do the purchase of the “acceleration boost” intentionally, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it, because the UX for it is unintuitive, and the whole upgrades menu itself is hidden behind at least 3 levels of clicks in the app.
- latortuga 7y agoDisclaimer: I have not purchased so I can't say for sure. The Upgrades menu is on the main list of options when you open the Tesla app on Android. I have not activated it myself by accident, but once you tap Upgrades, it loads the available options. There are 2 for me. If you "check" one of the options, it will be checked the next time you come back to the screen. After a checkbox is checked, there's a Pay Now link at the bottom of the screen. That's the workflow. I personally find it hard to believe it could be navigated completely by accident, but the placement of the menu option and the persisting of the checkbox across re-visits to the Upgrades screen make me think it's possible.
- sxates 7y agoMy Tesla app on the iPhone has an "Upgrades" page from the main menu, and on that page it offers to sell me a Full Self-Driving upgrade for $4000. There's a big Apple Pay button on the page to make the payment with a credit card. I'm not sure what happens when you click that, and given this person's experience I don't want to test it, but it seems like they made it pretty easy to spend $4k.
- mstade 7y agoI've "accidentally" purchased something with Apple Pay before. Not because I didn't want the item, but because I thought once you press "pay" it'd take you to a page to specify shipping address etc. no such thing – payment went straight through and they just assumed the shipping address was the same as for my Apple account. I don't know if this is the same with all Apple Pay purchases, this was my first time using it for anything physical and some place other than an Apple property. There was no confirmation page, or any way to really regret the purchase (that I could find) other than contacting the seller, which I did to clear up the shipping snafu. (I still wanted the item, just not to that address.) I've never opted for Apple Pay since, only ever just using card payments instead. It's marginally more involving when you've got cards setup with a secrets manager, but it's worth it to significantly reduce the risk of accidental purchase. If the purchase flow in this case made use of Apple Pay than I for one find the "butt dial" explanation very plausible.
- Cartonju 7y ago"flipping a few bits to refund a digital asset is as hard as refunding a house" what a joke
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoI feel like Tesla has optimized it's customer support for rich people who don't bat an eye at a few thousand here and there. I say this as a model 3 owner rather shocked at random costs that pop up from time to time...
- Stephen-E 7y agoLike what?
- BaconJuice 7y agoTIL Tesla sells DLCs for their vehicles.
- MisterTea 7y agoReason #43546 why I'm NEVER buying a Tesla. The laughably childish comparison to a contractor building an addition is beyond absurd and insulting. Tesla did not rip open the car and physically bolt on additions. No labour was performed and no materials were consumed. It simply flipped a few flag bits or downloaded an archive for $4,333. That should be very simple to reverse and refund, even if the software was used briefly. Going back to that stupid contractor analogy it would be the equivalent of buying a house with extra rooms locked by the contractor. Doesn't sound like your house anymore. And that took me all of 10 seconds to think up. Try again, rep. And lastly, what kind of customer service is that? What kind of company lets their reps fabricate awful analogies and patronize customers? That was just a really nice way of saying "fuck you, moron".
- woodandsteel 7y agoBut in spite of these problems, surveys find that Tesla owner satisfaction is very high. Maybe the service problems effect a relatively small number of owners? Maybe quality has been getting better, and service has been too? Or maybe Teslas have outstanding positive qualities that offset the service deficiencies? Maybe other auto makers also have equally bad service? Or a bit of all of these possible explanations?