What a Tesla-miss can teach us all about account management

After a long (and shameful) history of owning gas guzzling Chelsea tractors, 4 years ago I took delivery of my first EV and as family, friends and colleagues know only too well, have become a complete EV advocate - and no doubt bore!

I took out a 3 year finance contract on a Tesla and whilst it didn't do many miles during the pandemic, it's been a fantastic vehicle so far and I'll certainly never go back to an ICE car.

Whilst Tesla as a brand is clearly polarising, far from perfect as a service provider and rather too often controversial, thanks to the antics of one Mr Musk, I've still found it to be a brilliant piece of technology that serves its purpose to me - and the planet - extremely well.

So what's the Tesla-miss that can help those of us with customer bases that we're charged with taking care/maximising the potential of?

Well, after 2 years or so of my 3-year finance contract I'd expected that Tesla would have some clever system that would be monitoring the expiry of that term, correlate that with the c12-month waiting list (at the time) for the new version of my particular model and seduce me into ordering a shiny new Tesla with new bells and whistles that would glide silently up the drive just as my old one got to 36 months and headed back to the finance firm.

But no.

Total radio silence, other than the odd mass email about new models that I'm not interested in or weird accessories that even an EV nut like me wouldn't buy.

How could one of the worlds most valuable companies miss this easy sales opportunity?

How hard would it be to monitor this and automate the process of sending me personalised electronic encouragement to make a buying decision? (Breaking news - I'm extremely easy to sell consumer tech to!)

Worse than missing a chance to sell to me again, they lost me to the drug of monthly finance payments, which having become accustomed to I'd have easily agreed to maintain, if not even see an increase to.

But instead that last year of no contact from Tesla led me to examine my finance contract in a bit more detail than I might ordinarily have done and discovered that due to the amazing spike in second hand car values I could buy the vehicle for more than ￡30k less than its market value at the end of the contract. So I did - and now have no more monthly payments and of course have done the right thing for the planet by not putting another car into the world.

The truth is that I ended up doing the smartest thing both economically and environmentally but only because Tesla lack diligence in their customer account management systems.

Despite Tesla continuing to break many records for volumes, one factor bearing heavily on their much reduced share price for 2022 is the fact that their production volumes are starting to exceed their deliveries - by 22,000 in Q3 2022 for example.

At the end of 2022 we saw Tesla taking the unusual step of discounting to attract buyers before the year end. Classic desperate new business sales tactics that are being clumsily deployed when easy new car deliveries could be made to existing customer suckers like me

The old adage that it's five times more expensive to win a new customer than retain an existing one might not be quite so true in the 2020's when Customer Lifetime Value calculations can in some circumstances show a new customer can be worth much more than 5x an old one, the reality remains that losing value from existing customers through lax account management remains a heinous crime.

So how do you monitor, maintain and maximise your existing client relationships?

Do you really have the best possible systems, procedures and resources in place to make sure that sales opportunities with existing customers never leak through?

1. Start by honestly mapping your existing customer journey end-to-end, from cradle to grave. Always a revealing exercise and worth doing at least every couple of years.
2. Next, ask your longest standing customers what they really think of how effectively you try to sell to them. SPOILER ALERT - they always want a more personalised approach.
3. Monitor your value and volume retention/growth levels as assiduously as you monitor your new business pipeline
4. Run account loss workshops with cross functional leaders in the room where you stare in the face the internal factors that led to the loss.
5. Build predictive systems that use historical data to show the moments where customers are most susceptible. These AI systems have never been more widely available and the best time to start building the data was yesterday!

I'm not saying I'll never buy a new Tesla again, nor am I wishing that they had systems that hounded me throughout my contract; that's obviously an even bigger sin. But a sophisticated approach (electronic would have been just fine) might just have had me driving around in the latest model. In fact I might go and have a look at the Tesla site now...??♂?