My P1S just stopped powering on over a week ago. I immediately put in a support ticket and received the confirmation automated email. It’s now been 8 calendar days and 6 business days and I still haven’t had any response. I’m 100% dead in the water and can’t use my machine at all and no one has contacted me. There is no way to escalate or chat to / speak to a human being even to get an estimate on when I will get a response. Once you do get to me, based on my prior experiences, there will be 2-3 days wait in between any contacts and requests by your staff to isolate and identify whatever component is causing the issue… which means at least another full week before there is even a possibility of them shipping whatever part or parts are needed to resolve, then with shipping delays it could be another weeks time before I can optimistically expect to be back up and running.
The post about support being a priority sounds good but the state of affairs right now is unacceptable, considering all of us (not just the A1 customers) have been asking for an actual usable system and response time since the beginning. The company has ignored all of our concerns & requests for improvement all this time, but now that you have your first major recall of a very public safety issue, you want to make us feel better by telling us that support is important to you? You do realize that on ALL of the 3D printing forums, discord channels, social media and even on your own reddit communities the top warning to potential new owners is the horrible support that current owners have received. It’s not cost, reliability or anything to do with your actual printers even with the safety recall on the A1, it’s your support. A lot of us even hesitated before buying because of the potential issues if we needed support and it’s still surprisingly bad, even with the low expectations we had from that. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love everything about my printer, and I’ve consistently recommended BBL based on quality etc… with a caution based solely on my personal experiences with your support.
I’m not just frustrated with the quality and responsiveness of your support on a personal level, I’m appalled on a professional level at the visible lack of concern about a broken support process as I’ve worked in and around technical support since the early 90’s.
The very first introduction to your companies
Support ecosystem is a static web form that requires the same exact information regardless of the issue is technical, order related or print related. Let’s take my issue - “printer won’t power on”. How am I going to be able to provide printer log files? What relevance is my order number? My serial number should provide all of that info since it’s all in your systems already. It’s under warranty, it won’t turn on. That should at a minimum make all the fields on your form that are 100% useless to both you and I greyed out or at least not required.
The fact that you have a barely modified sales support form with a few added fields that don’t appear to make cohesive sense sends a distinct message to us… that message is that you care so little about us that you haven’t actually sat down to define an actual support process and you are far more interested in selling printers than you are in keeping customers up and running.
The worst part of it is it’s 100% preventable and may not even reflect how your organizations goals. Lots of us have tried to raise awareness of these problems over the past 12 months where I’ve been actively paying attention, and have gotten zero response from company resources until this whole A1 situation, where it seems like you are now reacting only because of the additional scrutiny it’s gathered.
My (completely unasked for) advice would be to
reach out to some organizations with great support reputations like Apple, HP, Dell etc and see if they are willing to do a round table or even just a Q&A session to provide some insight into how they triage support contacts across the globe for their sales support, warranty, software and hardware processes.
As far as completely unasked for advice, I’d consider having support during business hours (or at least overlapping) for the major area’s you sell to. The whole 2-3 days between responses due to time zone differences is killing us. (Particularly when it is just your techs asking for information that was already provided in the ticket, had they bothered to look.)
