Customer Relationship done right — a quick lesson from Elon Musk’s Twitter

In a post on Medium last month, I talked about why the internet is obsessed with Elon Musk. He has developed a cult-following as an entrepreneur and innovator on various social media platforms — everything he does is liked or retweeted obsessively, as if it’s a nugget of gold.

This obsession is not without merit. Musk has great business and marketing strategies, one of which he actively flaunts via 140 characters i.e Twitter.

In a recent tweet, Paul Franks, a Twitter user and Tesla owner, suggested to Musk,

@elonmusk can you guys program the car once in park to move back the seat and raise the steering wheel? Steering wheel is wearing.

No less than 24 minutes later, this is what happened — the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk responds,

“Good point. We will add that to all cars in one of the upcoming software releases.”

As said on Inc 5000, “What’s missing from this exchange is what we see in many companies: making excuses, shifting blame or responsibility to another department, or some other form of stalling that usually results in the death of good ideas.”

Jameson Dow explains on Electrek, “One of the things Tesla is able to do, as a smaller company, is to make changes a lot more quickly than larger companies can. It also helps that Tesla’s cars are capable over-the-air updates, so if a feature is missed, it can be added later in a software update. Most manufacturers would add these as part of a new model, in order to entice owners to upgrade their cars, but since the cost of the upgrade is so minor to Tesla, there’s no reason not to push the software out to every owner. This keeps customers happy and keeps them evangelizing the brand, resulting in high customer satisfaction numbers.”

Of course, this whole exchange and its reliability is possible only because Tesla cars are capable of receiving software updates. But the important takeaway from this is not that every automobile company should invest in making software updates available to their cars, but that Tesla works their competitive advantage time and time again, and other marketing teams should take a leaf.

But this isn’t the first time Musk has addressed a customer complaint via Twitter — it’s happened even several months ago. So was Tesla always this great at communication? Nope.

It turns out Tesla learnt from its mistakes, after being criticised and involved in several lawsuits for bad customer communication. They had their own horror stories where customers completely stopped receiving responses to pending issues.

So what did Tesla do? Did it simply promise to improve communication? No.

They instead announced to all users on the Tesla Motor Club forum that they could directly escalate issues to Tesla executives. So when issues get out of control or other Tesla employees are unable to address a concern, Tesla users can contact the highest decision makers like Jon McNeill, Tesla’s President of Sales and Service. And these guys do give a careful listen!

There are plenty of reasons why the world is obsessed with Elon Musk, excellent customer relationships is just one of them.