I recently received a survey from glowforge asking whether or not I would recommend their product to others.
I pressed number two, which means I would not recommend them to others. And, I typed in the following (below).
Twice I tried submitting it: once with a number two rating and again with a number four rating and neither one was successful. Then I tried submitting it with a number 8 rating and it was successful. Haha, jokes on me.
I recommended to my friend he buy a glowforge Pro and within two weeks he had some serious errors. It took him over 5 days just to get someone from support to contact him back. Days later customer support figured out it was probably a head issue and glowforge sent him a brand new head. But, due to a bad barcode created by glowforge, it was then stuck waiting on a new address from glowforge in FedEx for 5 days.
It is clear to me your company is more focused on making a sale then providing customer support. And for that I cannot recommend your product to any of my 40,000 YouTube subscribers.
That is a common practice for all kinds of products. Negative reviews are not accepted and you get inexplicable web-site errors when you try to submit.
I have taught Inkscape classes to several people but dissuaded them from buying a Glowforge, based on the decline in quality and poor support. Those of us who got machines early are doing fine.
As I stated above, this is common practice. I have had dozens of online “surveys” where a negative response was rejected, usually with a random web site error.
I have also had many Amazon reviews rejected when I posted honest feedback.
doesn’t mean it’s not worth complaining about and making public. “common” doesn’t mean “ethical.” and GF tends to present itself as ethical.
it’s common practice on some company boards to delete negative comments on their message boards. GF has never done that here (that we know of). they’ve left many negative comments. so doing so with reviews seems out of character.
i never understood the whole “staff only looks at support” section. i could get “staff only provides support in the support section,” but not really having any staff engaged with the rest of the forum is sad. there should be at least a community manager or two if you’re going to have a message board this active.
I agree but the reason is simply technical. Staff never browsed the forums, they only work from their support software, where posts to the threads that were linked to it would show up in support tickets. Only a few staff actually scanned the forums as “regular” members.
Should it be different? I’ve worked for companies where community engagement was encouraged. Support staff rarely did.
i don’t necessarily think support staff should be doing support on the boards. i think that actually was part of their problem in the past. there were multiple ways to start support tickets and they have enough trouble managing tickets w/o that.
but “community engagement” is a different type of company presence on their own boards. i’ve seen less of Dan’s involvement than we used to get too.
Worth mentioning that there is a sample size of one happening here. I won’t say it’s impossible that this survey is “rigged” but both Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors apply in this situation.
Does this survey post to a public place or just a reply to them? Does not make sense for them to rig a survey just providing feedback to them internally.
My thoughts exactly. The simplest answer is usually the right one. In this case, the survey uses a web farm and one or more of the servers is screwed up. Submitting it multiple times probably would have eventually gotten it through.
and if they could handle tickets from both places, i’d agree. considering how many tickets get lost in the cracks, i think they need to simplify their support path as much as possible until they start getting it right.
My purpose for posting is really simple. Many potential purchasers of a product will visit the forums as part of a due diligence process. Glowforge prices and represents themselves as the premier and most expensive solution for this type of product. They certainly have achieved a good reputation with regard to how easy their product is to use and how, when it works correctly, it creates very professional results.
Sadly, it has been my experience on more than one occasion, that trying to get someone there to respond to you is very difficult. I actually called and left a number of messages before purchasing my pro and I only received a call back over a week later. The person I talked to said they did not have very good systems for managing sales inquiries.
As far as the web application goes, I suppose you could be right that it is a server error of sorts. It perhaps happened at the wrong time.
So, all of this being said, one of the main strengths of glowforge and its support are these forums. There are many helpful people here who go out of their way to provide new users with tips, methods and procedures to help them get the most out of their glowforge laser printer. And for that I am extremely grateful!
You miss my point. Do you honestly think I would NOT recommend a product based on a tricky questionnaire response? That is the very least of the issues I have with glowforge customer support. Please recalibrate your theories.
Having been early in getting a Glowforge, I can certainly say I have had issues with support. However, a great deal is how you view the issues and their response. I also bought a 3D printer that has a customer support that makes Glowforge look extremely helpful, and there is no comparison with getting help from the user base as that has no such thoughts.
I do think that Glowforge has not figured out how what works with a user base of thousands can be scaled to a user base of tens of thousands and more, most of whom do not have experience with the graphic software or such high tech machines.