How's the quality of support been lately? (Page 1 of 2)

Read you loud and clear, although "support" doesn't control this. Was more asking about the quality of tech support.

Your particular order looks like it should be going out tomorrow. Crazy delay for a spare part, I agree.

I'm not sure how it is now but in September I had nothing but bad support.

I was being answered by another agent every time we exchanged emails and,
they would completely divert the situation and, wouldn't read my email thoroughly.
I constantly had to repeat my self which I hate doing.

On all honesty definitely the worse support I've ever had

they do not follow through with their e-mail support.
Do to my stupidity I broke the flex led and asked them if they would sell me a replacement length
they  wanted me to send them a picture of it working to see what was wrong with it.
the ^%^%$ wires are broke in 2 places so I want to replace it instead of splicing it. Since they did not reply with a price
I ORDERED IT else-ware.

I've had decent experiences with support.  I had a bad motherboard that was replaced in about a week and a half.  I had to call in though and give proof that the bad board was received.  SD said they couldn't find the board I sent in.  Only after UPS tracking showed that they signed for the package, they shipped out a new one which made me happy.

The biggest problem with SD support is responsiveness.  Why does it take so long to do things?  Orders should be shipped within a couple days max.  I know you want to separate our perceptions of the customer service or tech support department from the shipping department, but we all view it as the same company.  The biggest problem with SD is the fulfillment dept. in my opinion.

As far as tech support, I wish they were more knowledgable.  I contacted them for help with belt alignment and tensioning and it seemed like the person I spoke with had never even done that themselves.

All support emails should be a priority.

If they're not using a ticketing system they're crazy.

If they need a recommendation for one I'd suggest SYSAID.

These are great criticisms.

The lead time on repair parts is something we are working on. Since we don't reveal our internal organization, sometimes there is frustration. I can imagine someone thinking that the repair orders are simply stacking up on some support tech's desk. You should get a confirmation e-mail for the repair part as soon as you are confirmed for it. At the point it gets put into a shipping cue with other "priority orders." Solidoodle has a dedicated shipping clerk who deals only with parts (as opposed to printers.)

However, a large number of customers request priority status for things like work related problems, robotics contests, birthdays, international flights, repair parts. We try our best to be reasonable about what gets rushed. The lead time for things like this shouldn't be too bad even in the worst case, but we are actively working on it.

I agree that our support techs could use some more intense training. One challenge that support deals with is that we deal with a large variety of people. Not everyone responds to the same kinds of language. In general, things like belt tensioning are best learned from the videos. We have found that describing the internal positioning of the parts of the printer over the phone to be especially difficult.

If you can imagine:

"You must turn the set screw in the pulley on the X-Rod on the machine"
"You mean on the motherboard?"
"No, on the back of the inside of the machine"
"Ah so on the back wall?"
"No, on the rod, by the pulley"
"What's a pulley?"
"It turns, it's in the back of the machine on the X axis"
"So the motor?"
"No..."

That's a wild exaggeration, but you can imagine how such things go. It is very easy for us to fail to communicate the right parts of the printer over the phone. The videos are there to help people who don't want to learn all the jargon behind the printer and get up and running fast. We're working this though.

I really hate the idea of phone scripts, but I suppose that may be the way to go.

On the other end of the spectrum, we get folks who are mechanical engineers who ask very specific questions about bearings, tolerances, rod threading types. While some of our support agents can work with this, they are generally speaking not engineers and aren't able to answer some of the deeper questions more faithfully. The support techs have one objective, and that is to get the user up and running as fast as possible.

Criticism registered. We shall try and make them talk the talk a bit better.

Stab in the dark, but I think in this instance given it was severed wires - particularly since it was an admitted self-caused fault - there is no point to requesting pictures was more the issue and at the very least can be I'm sure pictured in ones mind what it looks like.  Anyway, ts not like it would help support solve future problems of a similar nature in this particular case

If it was a bent rod, or a cracked carriage or a 'fault' that could be potentially solved, or help others in future in anyway - then it probably wouldn't have been a problem requesting the pics.

Just in this case, it does seem wholly entirely useless to delay just fulfilling the request...

But thats just my $0.02 having read the description as an outsider...

http://www.soliforum.com/post/39799/#p39799

This may not belong here but....

Ordered a bunch of spare parts for the SD3 my work is using, one of the parts was a replacement nozzle.

4 days later I notice that they added a ton of new parts in the store, one of which was nozzle+barrel. I realized this was the part I actually wanted, so I emailed Support and asked if they could make this change.

The response I get is "Please transfer $6.00 to [email protected]"

I didn't even use paypal in the first place, who is to say I even have an account? I was thinking they could make changes to the CC payment but I could be wrong...

Then 15 minutes later I get another email from Support saying that my order has been flagged by their 'fraud department' and that they will not release my parts until I send them documents confirming my identity. (this is 5 days after I placed the order, were they ever going to tell me?)

At that point I said I don't care about the barrel, just get my parts shipped. Their response is that it doesn't matter, they need scanned utility bills from me.

So now even though my credit card has been charged $200+, my parts are being held until I agree to this strange request, something that I've never had to do in the hundreds (or even thousands?) of online transactions I have made throughout the years.

Its pretty normal actually. I got a order for two Filastruders from a guy who wanted them shipped somewhere different from his billing address. No other fraud protection telltales were triggered - the CVV matched, billing address matched CC address, etc.

A month later I got a chargeback - the credit card had been stolen, and apparently the billing address for it was obtained somehow. Now if someone wants to ship it somewhere different from the billing address, I ask for a copy of a utility bill or the first page of the CC statement. No fraud ever since.

At any rate, what is Solidoodle going to do with a copy of your utility bill? Not sure how that's "asking for your information to be stolen"... what information? Your address? Which they already have, stored in plaintext?

My billing address is a PO box, and the post office is not open by the time I get home anyways so I have to use a separate shipping address.

At any rate I relented and sent them the info, I don't want the engineers breathing down my neck about the parts.