Elon Musk, Tesla and One Happy Customer
Elon Musk is a trailblazer in the modern way of interacting with customers on social media
In the tweet above, an owner of a Tesla Model Y wrote on how owning a Tesla Model Y had been a dream of his. In the same tweet, the official company twitter handle of @Tesla and the personal twitter handle of Tesla’s CEO, @elonmusk were both notified.
Two things immediately lit up in my brain:
It can be safe to assume that some people who buy Teslas know who the CEO - Elon Musk- of Tesla is.
People love Tesla enough to tweet about it, producing free marketing for Tesla.
What happens next is something that a lot of people have come to expect from Musk.
Musk responded approximately twenty four hours after @aikatchu posted the initial tweet. His response encapsulates what makes Tesla, a special company: a company that has made just one annual profit in 10 years; with a close of trading share price of $1,000.90 on June 19, 2020; and a market capitalisation of $185.642 billion.
Firstly, how many CEOS of Fortune 500 companies have public twitter accounts? Of the few CEOS that have public twitter accounts, how many receive tweets about their companies let alone respond? How many CEOS use language like lmk? The point is that Musk is exceptional and the fan following he gets from both owners and non owners of Tesla cars is incredible.
Secondly, the fact the he asks what Tesla can do to improve the product is noteworthy; He is obsessed about the customer satisfaction; and gets unfiltered information straight from the consumer. This is very important as anyone who knows anything about passing information across a chain of command can tell you that information often changes form and that the speed at which information reaches the decision makers can be relatively slow. Contrast Musk’s approach with other companies in the same vertical as Tesla or in other verticals. This is what I call the Musk Customer Engagement Mode, focused and quick.
Finally, the idea that changes in one car’s firmware/software can be done immediately and scaled across the entire fleet shows the power of technology, specifically software. It is incredibly easy to scale solutions. It is one of the reasons why VCs in America have funded a lot of software firms over the past thirteen years.
In summary, there are four lessons for new or existing businesses:
Build an excellent product that your customers love.
Be obsessed with customer satisfaction.
Ensure that your customer feedback process is unfiltered and quick.
The marginal cost to scaling software is small.
I will end this post with Musk’s thoughts on what Tesla is below and I promise to write a post on this sometime in the future.
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