I don’t know if anyone else has had this horrible experience. And I don’t know if this is a major issue that Tesla actually needs to go investigate or if this was a one-off anomaly. If it’s a one-off anomaly, and you’re the product manager, then you have to prioritize. But I would say that events like this feel like a moment of truth. So what can you do if you wanted to take on the role of thinking more like a Customer Experience Product Manager? I think there are four core things you have to do.
Know Your Customer
The first thing is you really have to know your customer. And by that, I mean, don’t just know Tesla drivers. Know drivers who’ve experienced a breakdown on the highway. Then go figure out how many of them are there. Is it a sizable cohort? And is it an important cohort for you? And then uncover your customers so that you can understand the different groups of customers and where are the distinct trends in your data. Then once you do that, take a cohort of customers that have some common characteristics like that and monitor the complete journey.
So figure out how to use both your funnel data and customer’s feedback. Ask them about their experiences to fill out those journey maps and capture what they’ve done. And when you can overlay those two things, you start to find opportunities. Then once you find those opportunities, most of them will be things that no single scrum team or no single PM can fix. In fact, these opportunities require cross-team or even cross-organizational coordination.
Addressing The Moment of Truth
So what would it look like if a customer experience PM took a look at the moment of truth that I experienced? Well to begin, they could’ve looked at the moment the car broke down. Plus, they could probably build an ML model to detect a breakdown event. They do have error message data and location data about the car. So you can start to triangulate across data sources and detect things that indicate a breakdown while driving.
Next, you could think about, what can I do to delight the customer when their car breaks down? A basic one would be to automatically turn on the hazard lights after a shutdown. Or at least have a notification with some instructions on where to find the hazard light button. Then, you could create a mobile app that checks in with the customer after having some car trouble.
Other opportunities for improvement include roadside assistance, towing experience, and emergency situation protocols. But again, if you’re not looking for these moments, and looking across the customer journey, you’re not going to think about these kinds of features.
So I really just want to close with three questions that I hope you can take back to your practice and put to use. First, are you monitoring your customer journey health? If so, do you know what the key moments of truth are for your customers? And then third, once you know that, what will it take to turn them into moments of delight so that you can drive retention for your customers?
About the speaker
Gail Giacobbe is a Director of Product & Data Science at Microsoft - focusing on the company’s experience & devices organization that provide organizations with tools to scale their business. Prior to joining Microsoft, Gail was VP Product at GoDaddy and led product teams at Skype - along with over a decade at Microsoft working on their Office product team. Gail holds a Master’s Degree from Brown University and currently lives in Seattle.