| To assume that your customer must be intelligent is the biggest mistake you can ever make. I worked at the Dell technical support call center some years back and our training said very specifically until you ascertain the caller actually knows what he is doing, you need to assume they are dumb. This saves a lot of trouble. There are countless times when some one calls and I have to explain them they can get internet on their computer only if they a internet connection. It takes a lot of patience, to explain to someone that the the CD needs to be put in the CD drive with the shiny side facing down. Many people don't understand that they need something like VLC player or a codec to play a video. Many people would view a computer as something similar to a TV. They simply expect things to work out of the box. There are times when I have assisted the elderly in creating email id's and teaching how to use email. There was one elderly woman who had literally become friends with me, I had to call her everyday and practically tutor her. The managers were OK, because many times this sort of calls bought in sales. And this is beyond real issues that we would solve. You can't adopt a programmers approach of RTFM or get lost approach or act like 'I know it all' with ordinary people. In this case not everyone will understand enough chemistry behind how batteries work. That is simply too much to ask from an ordinary user. Your product automatically needs to check for the temperature around, do the magical calculations and tell the user EXACTLY what they need to do. And when someone calls you for help you need to first ensure they are safe before beginning to do any trouble shooting. At the call center, we would specifically instruct the customers to shut down their machines before trouble shooting for any thing more than a trivial software install. In this case the guys at Tesla should have asked him to get this batteries to be charge to 100% before investigating or advising him any further. And yes customer support is a part of the product not something apart from or outside it. Its all a part of the package. If you a sell a great car with bad customer support, you are ideally selling a bad car. |
It's not about customers being less intelligent than you; that's an arrogant stance to take in these kinds of situations. Lots of people are intelligent enough to understand how batteries work -- or how computer programs work -- if they should choose to spend the time and effort it would take to do so.
But they're not choosing to do so. They're not your R&D team. They're your customers, and they're paying you big money for something that will make their lives easier.
In this case, they're paying for a car that's going to get them from point A to point B with no hassles, so they can focus their intelligence on problems of their choosing, not on problems with your product.