I never said it didn’t happen, of course it does. But to use your example, if Takata airbags continued to be faulty over and over and over again, and the company did nothing but offer half assed solutions that had no sense of urgency there would be a boycott of them. This is what has happened with GF. They have recurring issues that they have been unable to fix and they continue to brush them under the rug. I have personally spoken to 15 others who have had the exact issues I’ve had within the same timeframe. Most got different responses from GF. We have Screen shots of emails so to those who try to call bullshit good luck with that. I’ll bow out of this conversation since its clear that nobody can be critical of a company that sells a $6k machine that doesn’t perform as advertise. Pardon me for expecting results that they advertise with materials they advertise. LOL
I believe Glowforge is fairly interested in customer feedback - they read this forum. I don’t think they have to share our idea regarding what their business model should be. You may have an idea of how they should spend their money, you may think they are misguided when it comes to advertising expenditures and you may think they are digging the hole deeper. But I am beginning to think this is just a thread to bash them because their level of customer service is not what you wish it was. The Problems and Support category is for requesting assistance not for general ranting or airing of grievances. Maybe we should move this to Everything Else because it is not a serious request for Glowforge assistance.
I posed a serious question have responded to the comments I’ve gotten. The original comment wasn’t a bash on anything. The people who commented chose the direction this went. I’m simply continuing the conversation thats being had.
Its not what I want or what I think their business model should be vs what they think it should be. Ill give a real world example. The first issue I had took 18 days to resolve. It would have taken a 10 minute phone call. Butntheu don’t have a phone number. They jave made literally $100 million dollars in the past few years from investors and sales and refuse to provide basic customer service to their customers. Thats not me thinking their business model is flawed. Thats their business model being flawed. At my day job I run a several hundred million dollar a year business. If we didn’t have a phone number for them to call let alone answer an email for 4 days my boss would get an angry call and then I’d get a letter telling me when my last day was, and our average customer spends about what a GF costs.
If you’re in the business of doing business then you should know that customer service is everything. I simy asked whether others thought they should spend more time and resources on this and improving the core design of the machine rather than create features that are useless if the machines basic parts don’t function.
Amazing how many lemons you got and so many others are still happy with their first. I am on my second but now realize I was using magnets without realizing how they hurt the machine,
They have improved a number of things. Using the sensors to track and alert for issues with the air assist fan. Camera calibration from home. The passthrough software. I could go on, but those are clear examples of improvement to already existing features.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re upset about, but your car analogy is a poor one. Once you buy a car, there are typically no improvements whatsoever, unless there’s a recall. New models may have improvments, but then you’re paying all over again.
Or do you just want completely upgraded machines? Because that’s something else entirely. And I think the argument could be that they are better serving their customers by upgrading the machines we all already own. I mean, customer service continues to be a challenge, but that has nothing to do with product upgrades.
They did this recently.
False. @swmisher It’s because posts in this section, Problems and Support, creates a help desk ticket even if no actual technical help support is being requested.
Ive had my machine for a year. The first one did have a problem,The company responded to my email within a day & a week or so later i had a replacement. I have had nothing but endless pleasure out of this tool. I hope and expect you will be as happy as I and thousands of other users.
With all that was said here, I am still looking forward to getting my machine! I hope it will serve me well for some time. As they say, time will tell!
Those are all features that are great but why do we still have to get entire replacement machines when a wheel or belt fails? Why are machines made and shipped with parts that are prone to fail? Those are the types of things that need improving.
My car analogy is spot on I’m not asking for all existing machines to be upgraded. I’m asking for them to improve over time. Would you buy a Honda if their new 2021 model was the same as one from 1990? Probably not. You, like most people, would have expected them to make improvements over time. Read a few comments up, my Takata airbag comment.
Customer service and product upgrades go hand in hand. Everything you do in business, and I really do mean everything, is customer service. Ultimately everything that any company does affects customer satisfaction. Also, my above comments make it clear that I suggest trying not to sell more machines as they can’t keep up with the customer service and tech support demands as it is. And that’s no knock on their CS or tech staff, they do what they can but their company limits them by not giving them the resources they need to properly do they’re jobs.
I’ve literally had comments on social media deleted when I expressed anything negative about the machine or tried to clarify that while they advertise that you can use thousands of materials they only cover the machine if you’re using proofgrade materials.
They aren’t lemons. A lemon is something that breaks regularly and can’t be fixed. These can and are fixed, at least I think, and then sent to other people. The fact that so many have failed either or of the box or after a short time isn’t unique to me. I personally know a few people who have gone through 5+ machines.
Yes the most of the bad machines end up with a small minority of people. I wonder why? I would love to see the real data on that. The same problems keep coming up for each person, but different across the board.
GF only controls the boards here. They have no other place they work in or control.
If you want to say they don’t allow negativity, you ought to track back to some of the oldest threads buried around here that were people exploding over the 2nd 6 month delay, and the 3rd, of the original shipment. No one got banned(I think only 1 person has ever been banned for continued sharing of things warned and suspended previously for-it wasn’t for being negative to GF), no thread got closed. I think they eventually got closed after they’d been dead for 2 years.
Posts in this section open support tickets. Support tickets need to be closed once resolved.
I don’t know why you have had to get entirely new machines, but plenty of other people have just gotten parts.
I still think your car analogy makes no sense in this case, it it obviously speaks to you, so it’s not worth debate. We’re not talking about cars.
If we’re going with the “everything you do is customer service” idea, then there’s no reason to separately call out “customer service.” You’re changing definitions mid-discussion. Either we mean customer service to cover all the things, or we’re specifically using it to mean direct response to immediate customer needs. I don’t care which it is, but we can’t have a logical conversation if the definition is fluid. That aside, I suggest you look closely at the financial model before you suggest that they stop selling machines. Where do you think the money comes from to support current customers, improve current machines, and innovate? Until the launch of the subscription service, it basically came from new customers. Once again, I have no arguments with you on the [narrow definition] customer service challenges GF is facing. They absolutely need to get that figured out. But I think your comments about improvements are off-base. Passive-aggressive, honestly, and off-base.
The onus for that is on the social media group, not on Glowforge. You can also find negative comments here on the forum and they are not deleted by anyone. They may get flagged for going against the rules set forth…they may be ‘closed’ if they’re in the P&S section and aren’t really something that P&S can’t help with…but, they are not deleted.
Many of those emails are issues that could have been addressed in this forum or are duplicates of posts here. I’ve seen many screen shots on other forums where people are asking about issues that should not be going to support staff. This is a waste of the support teams time and energy. They also monitor this section of the thread and as @dklgood points out…
We have 37 comments in this thread alone that’ll now have to be read by a support team member to see if there is an issue that needs to be addressed. Therefor I am moving it to another section.
Its on THEIR posts and sponsored ads. Who else would delete them? Lol
How does the car analogy not make sense? Should a company improve their product over time? Would we be happy with cars that used 20 year old technology being made today? No. We want better materials and things that hold up better. We used to have cars that quit after 50k miles. Now we have cars that go 500k with just oil changes. GF hasn’t improved on any of the things that it should have by now. The fact that they send whole machines when a part fails is moot when they should be redesigning their machines with parts that don’t fail after basic use. They are behind industry standard for anything that involves moving parts. Is it a bad machine? No. Does it need to be improved to include parts and processes that are more up to date? I think most reasonable people would argue yes. Thats all I’m asking for. Physically the machine is almost identical to the one release years ago. They need to figure outnways to either source better parts and materials or redesign so that stress isn’t put on parts thenway it is as their design currently dictates.
As for your comment about their financial model and them selling machines to make money. You must not be aware of all the outside money GF has gotten over the years. I think its close to 100 million from investors and deals with other companies who have purchased portions of the company. If they released a financial statement im betting you’d see that they have made more from that then from selling machines.
And the reason that they are inundated with emailes is because they don’t have enough support staff. Thats on GF. And fornyou to suggest that as a customer you should have to go to a group instead of to the company and that its a waste of company resources to engage with customers is pretty shitty. Hope you fix all your own stuff and never have to go anywhere for service. That would be a waste of company resources. Lol