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Comment by sithadmin | Hacker News Reader

>"[The Tesla Owner Advisor] called me to explain he had a call in with the Office of the CEO at Tesla and was working with his team in Tesla to resolve a problem that had come up — their CEO, Elon Musk, had taken my car and was using it as his personal vehicle to test a new version of autopilot. Even worse, he said he could see all the calls I had made into the Orlando delivery center this past week, and no one was taking my calls because no one knew what to do."

The fact that a customer-facing resource is airing information about internal process screwups directly to a customer is indicative that something is very wrong with service management at Tesla; this is a bush-league customer service mistake. Not only is the customer being informed that there is a apparently a massive issue with the pipeline for delivering product to customer, but they're also indicating that there's clearly nobody enforcing ownership or accountability for reported issues.

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The article I read said "(1) tesla fucked up a customer's order, then (2) tesla fucked up fixing it ten times in a row at many different levels of the organisation despite the fact a fix should have been easy, then (3) the customer insisted on an explanation and someone at tesla was honest"

I'm confused as to why you think (3) is the problem here - it seems to me that (1) and (2) are the root cause - (3) is just an embarrassing repercussion.

I mean, the customer knows there's nobody enforcing ownership or accountability for reported issues when they contact ten different people and can't get the problem resolved. It's not like inscrutable customer service would have hidden the fact the car hadn't been provided.

I think GP assumed that (1) and (2) being problems is obvious, and so pointed out that (3) is a problem too, even if less obvious.

A support rep's main job is to put the customer at ease. The more details the customer has to contend with the more stressed out they are.

The best action here would be explain that there was an internal process issue at Tesla, apologize and then make an offer to reconcile the error.

edit: wording

It only reduces the customer's stress to hear "don't worry about it sir, I'll take care of it" if that statement is credible. If I'm being told that and I know it's bullshit, my stress level is increased, not decreased.

Once the customer is on their third call to customer service, the credibility is already lost. Unless the customer will have their car in a single digit number of days, refusing to be honest with them isn't going to help.

Customer service's job is also to make the company not look bad. If you're fully honest about something as ridiculous as the CEO not letting you have your car, and then proceeding to not answer your calls because no one knew what to do, that makes the company look terrible.

If you share that kind of knowledge, the customer might end up writing a blog post showing how incompetent the company is, and that blog post might make front page of Hacker News.

Two seperate issues there, 1) I don't see a problem with a honest CSR 2) yeah there is no way that a car that had been allocated to a customer should be taken even by the CEO.

Honesty is rarely an issue, the lack of accountability is.

There's an important distinction between an "honest" CSR and an oversharing CSR. The response of a CSR to a complaint should be "I'm sorry this happened. Here's how I will make it right". Occasionally it's OK to say "we made mistake X", but don't try to excuse the issue.

Generally, the customer does not care or want to know exactly what went wrong. If I order a burger from a restaurant and it comes out wrong, I expect the establishment to apologize and quickly provide me another burger. I don't need to know that someone called in sick and there is a football team that swamped their lunch hour while they were short-staffed. Those are the restaurants problems, not mine.

>There's an important distinction between an "honest" CSR and an oversharing CSR.

It seems an appropriate response to this (not uncommon in different contexts) situation would have been to say something like: "It turns out that even though the car you purchased was listed as available in our inventory system, it's not." At which point, the CSR should have been empowered to do something along the lines of offering an equivalent or better car for the same price and expediting delivery.

My best-ever CSR experience: buying an engagement ring online from Blue Nile, which was supposed to arrive in time for my pre-planned out-of-state meeting with her family. There were a handful of delays that had me worried. CSR named Sean (how often do you remember CSR's name? Only when the experience is awesome) reaches out to me and says in essence "we had a supply issue and we can't get you what you ordered, so I'm going to look through our current inventory and see what I can get you that's better." A couple hours later he gives me info on a slightly bigger stone with equal-or-better specs, I OK it, and it shows up overnight.

IMO it was the perfect experience. They let me know there was a problem, but didn't overshare or turn their problem into my problem. And then they let me know how they were going to solve the problem of getting me something I'd be happy with given what I thought I had ordered. And then they delivered.

Personally, if a CSR is up front about what went wrong, what they did to try to fix it/what they're doing to get it fixed, I'm a happier customer. I've worked in enough large organizations to understand how difficult things can get when navigating multiple departments and multiple people trying to get some corner case situation cleared up.

> they're also indicating that there's clearly nobody enforcing ownership or accountability for reported issues.

Based on gossips about how it allegedly is like to work for Elon Musk, it might be that people are even more scared of reaching out to him than to violate the process.

Which is a deadly issue: when people are too scared to give honest feedbacks to their CEO, the CEO stops knowing how his company actually runs. Parallels can be made with soviet countries, run through the deforming lenses of five-year plans and fantasy reports.

God forbid a customer service agent ever give you a straight answer...

They're probably just terrified of Elon. Fear would explain the paralysis; I'm not sure why they thought that not communicating would make things better.

Honestly, as a customer, I appreciate the honesty and clarity of this CSR. Ideally, the CSR would just do something to quickly resolve the issue without divulging details. But if they can't actually fix it, being honest about the reasons is the best they can do. Then I can at least empathize with someone, feel like someone is empathizing with me, and not feel like everyone there is jerking me around.

The actual screw up at Tesla is that this kind of problem should literally never ever happen, and that CSRs should never be put in this situation.

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