Company support help

Sorry to air my problem with the company support, I have a machine that they said has to be sent In, so I packed it all up and have it sitting on my kitchen island since Monday and now radio silent until this morning where they put me off again, no paper work or status on the refurbished machine. I have sent daily emails, instagram messages and left phone messages. Anything Im missing. They have always been so quick to respond that this is hard to understand how they can’t close a ticket not to mention the loss in my business. thanks.

If they are going to ship a refurb machine to you they may be waiting on word from the warehouse that one is ready and shipping. They don’t keep machines in stock at the office and repair is done off site as well so they generally are in the dark as much as everyone else I think. That said… they AREN’T very fast to respond. So if you’ve been getting a decent response time from them you are the exception to the rule, not the norm.

That said… you should always have a backup plan for your business in case of downtime. You are using a machine that while they tend to blur the lines on whether it’s a business machine or hobby… it’s definitely a hobby machine. An overpriced hobby machine, but a hobby machine none-the-less and their support is pretty well hobby level most of the time (to be generous). Given the shipping times I’ve seen, if you have orders to fill I would DEFINITELY start looking for a maker space that you might be able to rent time at to finish those orders because you might not see a replacement machine for weeks (or, it could be next week… you never know with them.) Perhaps find another GF owner in your area that you could beg/borrow/steal time on their machine? Wishing you good luck in any case.

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Closing your ticket will involve at least 3 employees at 3 different companies coordinating on at least 7 different tasks, the first 5 of which have to be fully completed before they can give you any update. Since they have hundreds of other tickets to attend to at the same time, this stuff will mostly happen asynchronously with different employees picking up the ticket at different stages when various information becomes available, so it’ll actually involve more than 3 people. With everyone involved backed up, short on staff and short on parts, things take time.

  1. They have to check with the company that handles refurbishing and logistics for refurbished machines on availability of the model you’re getting as a replacement. There are times when no refurbished replacements are immediately available, and other arrangements have to be made.
  2. Before your machine can be returned, they have to set up an RMA (return authorization) with the warehouse that’s going to accept it, so that it can be properly received and inventoried for repair after you ship it out.
  3. After the warehouse accepts the RMA, Glowforge staff have to prepare the RMA paperwork and barcode for you to include in your box. This will get attached to an email to you eventually.
  4. After those steps are complete, the Glowforge staff can determine the right carrier for your return, then quote and purchase the shipping labels for it, which have the RMA info on them as well. This will get attached to an email to you eventually as well.
  5. Now the GF staff can go into their Shopify backend to make up the draft order for your replacement machine, apply the appropriate price adjustments, and send you the invoice (even if it’s for $0 as a warranty swap).
  6. Finally, the GF staff member has gotten to the point where they can respond to your ticket! You’ll get the response alongside the invoice from their online store for the replacement machine, and they’ll have attached all the paperwork you need to ship your broken machine back.
  7. The ticket remains open but a followup is scheduled to check in on you to make sure the replacement was delivered and is working for you.

Some food for thought.

A week with no response and no set expectation is the problem. My back up plan is a second machine, which was also down and a part was just received. I also just ordered a makeblock. It will be interesting to see how it performs.

Food for thought would be clear communication which hasn’t happened. We all know what things are like so taking the extra few seconds to level set things would be the right thing to do. Look how much time you took, do you work there? If not maybe they should hire you.

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All of the above is just the unfortunate truth.

Glowforge is a hobby/crafting machine, and their support reflects that. Communication has always been a bone of contention, and it’s gotten really bad lately.

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I think they’ve already added an automatic mail that goes to tickets that have been open some time apologizing for the delay and letting you know you’re not forgotten. I remember someone sharing something like that recently.

Nope. If I worked there, I doubt I would have the free time to write all that up during the work day. Too busy trying to make headway on the insurmountable pile of tickets.

I’ve followed that machine since I saw it on Naomi Wu’s youtube channel. It’s as close to a complete clone/rip-off of the glowforge as you can get I think. But that’s not entirely a bad thing if they also make it more accessible for the end user to work on and replace parts. That I am not so sure of. And you can get one with a rotary tool now as well so that’s a bonus. And it’s about 30-40% cheaper than the glowforge. Still pricey, but better. The software isn’t web based so that’s good (and has design features that GF doesn’t have) and I don’t think you need an internet connection for it either. It’s chinese, but as Naomi says… “If you want cheap, the Chinese will happily sell you cheap crap. If you want iphone quality, they can do that too, but the price will reflect it.” To paraphrase. :slight_smile:

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Cant say my glowforge isn’t cheap made either, just got my replacement machine, it worked for one day. The makeblock so far so good, it runs lightburn or their platform, Im trying to protect my business and unfortunately glowforge has become unreliable. Im now waiting on another email since no one answers the phone anymore, that will take at least 3 days if not longer. No one was a bigger fan than me but the support has surly fallen off.

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