This topic contains 13 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by 
Pete 5 months, 3 weeks ago.
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I don’t know if it’s just me seeing this, but there seems to be a few embittered and wronged Robox users in the outside world at the moment.
I saw an emotive post earlier this morning, that was somebody at the end of their tether, and the common theme is how they feel they’ve been unfairly treated or mislead.
I know in my case I have had my share of hardware & software issues, but only one was down to me, when I did something foolish after being frustrated by circular messages within Automaker. The rest are caused by premature end of life components, third party human errors in the upgrade process, conflicting advices from the Forum vs Support, and design led choices that create their own faults or foibles.
It’s hard developing a fault free product, but I do wish their was greater acceptance from the Robox team, that it isn’t always the customer at fault, and there was more openness & accountability when it wasn’t. I see this with other hardware developers, where they have a more open issue reporting structure, and it reaps dividends with customer loyalty.
Just another 2¢, because the other side of the coin is your perceived stance upsets people, and they post things like a few have seen today, and others like this 😮
http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.php?30852-Robox-(CEL)-support-total-failure
@17bt Please take those posts with a grain of salt. Often forum posts only tell one side of the story. All CEL employees work very, very hard to meet the needs of customers. Not every customer can be served to their satisfaction, either due to complications out of the power of the support personnel to change or due to unreasonable expectations. Unfortunately, it is these customers who often are the most vocal. The customers who make up the vast majority of support contacts don’t post to these forums and don’t speak up because they don’t have anything to speak up about.
Also note that as is posted on the front page of the forum that any information here is considered at your own risk and the instruction received via a support ticket always takes precedence. There is information on this forum that is out of date, not applicable to the Robox, experimental, or in a few cases may just be wrong. When looking into a problem with the Robox, a support ticket is always your best source of information.
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This reply was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by
BHudson.
I operate two Betas and four Production Robox.
I am the US/Canada Technical Support engineer for the Robox.
See my 3D Hub site at https://www.3dhubs.com/phoenix/hubs/ben@bhudson I’d rather not see posts like that to be honest, and plainly these folks are disgruntled, but re your assertion that Support Tickets take precedence over the Forum, as the best possible source, that’s a little disingenuous, because that is not always the case. It is a two way street. 🙂
I personally have been given Support Advice on a couple of occasions, with good intentions obviously, that was plainly misguided with hindsight, and had I carried these instructions out, I would have been more likely to damage my printer, by performing more operations than required. It’s well recognised that human interactions on machinery increase their unreliability, but fortunately, as I tried to carry out these instructions, I began to take these with a grain of salt, and realised they were an unnecessary complication, so a lesson was learned here too.
I wasn’t bitter and twisted about it, it’s a human thing, after all production assembly is a different process to after market repairs , so I just passed the info back onto the Support tech that gave the advice, as a FYI.
Other times, the advice on the Forums has been spot on, because the person replying has recognised the same symptoms, and can pass on the benefit of their knowledge and experiences, and this isn’t always the case with a Support Technician, who strips & then builds things back up. Yes, they will have a knowledge of the failings, because they see recurring issues, but a one time owner of a Robox won’t see this, however a collection of users on a forum will.
Please don’t take my comments as being critical, they are purely observational, and I have no axe to grind, or sandpit outside either. 🙂
@17bt CEL support tickets always take precedence over forum advice. The advice on your support ticket is tailored to your specific reported issue and your specific printer. If you were provided with steps you felt you didn’t need to complete you should have brought that up on the ticket as the advice provided on a support ticket is intended to protect your warranty and your printer.
I do not see why this statement, which is on the front page of the forum, is at all dishonest.
I operate two Betas and four Production Robox.
I am the US/Canada Technical Support engineer for the Robox.
See my 3D Hub site at https://www.3dhubs.com/phoenix/hubs/ben@bhudson Obviously your comprehension of the content of my post is somewhat different to mine, and I really don’t think I can put it any clearer, but I am not being deliberately obtuse. 😉
If you were provided with steps you felt you didn’t need to complete you should have brought that up on the ticket as the advice provided on a support ticket is intended to protect your warranty and your printer.
That’s not what I said, I was following the support advices given to me, as you’d expect them to be correct coming from the official channel, which unfortunately were only found wanting with hindsight, as I tried to carry out the task as detailed by the CEL instructions, and I was somewhat perplexed by a couple of steps.
As it was, I did pass the information on when CEL opened up & that was after the weekend break, so the mistake wasn’t perpetuated, which you’d like to think was appreciated, but who knows.
Warranty? Have another slurp, and read the small print, CEL like others, don’t cover third party ownership, but that’s another topic entirely, and something you have to live with, if you buy a secondhand machine not realising this.
None of this makes me a disgruntled customer, I have just learned a lesson, that advice is just that, advice, and it can come from a variety of sources, and if somebody tells you to put your head in the oven, and you blindly follow, that’s Darwinism in action.
@17bt Every time I give advice, I have to assume the user has a warranty that they would like to retain. Either way, a support ticket should be the first place any Robox user goes for actual support. The forum content, good intentions or not, is not reliable in every case and is downright damaging in some.
Without knowing your specific situation I can’t comment on it. What I am trying to get across is that users, especially those with warranties, should always go with support ticket advice before forum advice.
As far as public relations, I am choosing not to comment on that because of my involvement in one of the posts linked in your post. I am only commenting on your statement about conflicting information between official CEL support and what is on these forums.
I operate two Betas and four Production Robox.
I am the US/Canada Technical Support engineer for the Robox.
See my 3D Hub site at https://www.3dhubs.com/phoenix/hubs/benI’m with @17bt with this one. These 3 posts of his here are really well balanced and measured and by no means directed against CEL. On contrary - I can see them as really positive criticism - almost like advice. After all, we all (Robox customers) would like to see CEL thriving and as wide adoption as possible as it would benefit us as well. It is teeth grittingly bad reading @bhudson (hope not deliberately) misunderstanding Mike’s sentiment. It really doesn’t help public relations to read something like that from someone who might be understood to be representing CEL in any way.
BTW Mike is not only one who was given odd advice from the support. I have also been given strange support advice by CEL support at one or two occasion (among quite spot-on suggestions on all other occasions) which could cost me much more than what the problem really was (which was, at the end, deducted in couple of hours and fixed by me with next to nothing cost - and shared that back with the support). I bet that there are many more who would feel same as Mike and I in that respect - and not take it directly against CEL. Also I do understand that there are difficult customers and I really hope that occasional £100-£200 that might cost CEL to show ‘good will’ is not to much for the company. So far only a few people complained about customer support and much more praise it. Why spoil it for a handful of customers that feel betrayed? What would be the point of proving who is right and who is wrong if that might cost business money? And post like Mike pointed to do not help CEL in general. I am aware that CEL did handle similar situations in the past and it usually was sorted to everyone’s satisfaction (hence lack of such ‘bad press’). Why not now?
Support advice is always provided on the best information available. As I deal with 20-30 customers per week, I can tell you that deciphering what describes the actual problem based on the information in a support ticket is not easy. Many people use different terms for the parts of the printer, assume the support agent knows what they mean when they use a certain word, or are simply unable to explain the issue in a way that can be deciphered. I have had customers answer questions one way only to provide completely contradicting information in the very next email.
I don’t say that it is the customer’s fault or the technician’s fault. It is a huge challenge to communicate in the method that is required to be a support technician. When the customer chooses not to have patience or chooses not to communicate it becomes a problem. In rare occasions, the customer’s expectations are not within the power of the technician to meet. This can be due to a variety of sources. It is these situations that generally lead to unhappy customers.
In the first post, based on my understanding of the information posted, the print head had failed due to a repairable condition, was repaired, at the customer’s cost as the print head was out of warranty, but then failed shortly after return due to a non-repairable condition. My understanding of the customer’s complaint is that the technician offered to repair the print head but didn’t expect the second failure and didn’t offer a replacement print head instead of the repair. I would have done exactly the same thing as this tech. If the print head was repairable and didn’t show signs of a pending failure, I would have repaired it and returned it. There is a discussion of end of life that I don’t understand - if a print head is working and repairable it should be repaired. I have seen version 1 print heads be repaired and go on to work for many hundreds of print hours. I expect that there is a misunderstanding on one part or the other.
I can tell you that CEL spends much, much more than several hundred pounds a year on good will. I have personally seen it and I have supported many customers in such a fashion to maintain good will. There are certain cases that it doesn’t matter what CEL offers, the customer isn’t ever happy. In these cases, what other choice is there? Some of the good will support I have seen boggles my mind. But these cases are not seen. All of the work that CEL does to keep customers happy goes silent for the most part. The vocal are mostly those who either can’t be helped or for which there is no reasonable solution. There are customers who expect warranty coverage when their warranty has expired months ago, who expect warranty coverage on printers purchased from a third party, and who cause damage to their printers and expect CEL to cover it under warranty. Many times these customers are vocal about their “bad treatment”. There is a point where CEL can’t do anything else for free because if they did they would go out of business due to lack of money.
In this particular case, I strongly suspect that the unheard side of the story, that CEL will not make public, would reveal that there is a lot more going on here than we are seeing. As no other user has been banned in the history of the forum that I am aware of, something very serious happened in this case.
I can also tell you that all suggestions made to support with regard to changes in instructions are fully reviewed and incorporated when they are found to be safe for everyone to use. If you do not see your suggestion incorporated, it may simply be a matter of hardware applicability, or that the changes are still being reviewed, or one of several other things.
I do not ever misunderstand posts on purpose. If I don’t understand your post it is an honest misunderstanding and the meaning I took from it is what I thought you wanted to say.
My understanding is that Mike is saying that maybe CEL has something to learn from these cases of vocal complainers and that if they would accept that customers can be right sometimes and that the perceived stance that the customer is always wrong isn’t the way to go forward, they would have more loyal following. My counter to this is that CEL does this. All of the points that I saw in Mike’s post have an explanation, that CEL doesn’t anger customers on purpose, that they don’t provide bad advice on purpose, and that if they make a statement about it being the customer’s fault, it is because the information they have leads them to that conclusion. I have personally come to the wrong conclusion on several occasions based on the information I was provided, made mistakes, or overlooked something. I always do my best to make it right. I have no problem admitting that I made a mistake and I apologize when I do. I also will apologize and make it right when a customer is wrong but I feel it is better to keep them happy than to be right. Every other CEL tech operates the same way because we all get the same training on how to deal with customers and I have read the responses of techs who have been in that situation.
Part of the reason that I am vocal in response to posts and threads like this is that I see what happens on the other side, the part that you don’t see. I see CEL doing everything they reasonably can, and sometimes making huge exceptions to policies, to fill the needs of their customers and keep them happy. I also see some of those occasions where customers can’t be sated and the time and resources required to deal with those situations. I have seen customers abuse techs to the point of threats of violence against their person and use abusive language to technicians. Technicians have to call a stop at some point or you don’t have technicians any more because they all quit due to the stress.
My point is that there is always another side of the story that you may not see. There is a reason for every behavior you don’t agree with. Take complaints with a grain of salt. The more dramatic the complaint, the more probable there is a backstory that isn’t being heard.
I operate two Betas and four Production Robox.
I am the US/Canada Technical Support engineer for the Robox.
See my 3D Hub site at https://www.3dhubs.com/phoenix/hubs/benI agree that CEL has to learn some lessons. Forum complaints can have a huge impact on the image of a product.
My experience with CEL support is however very good. The serious flaws that where in the printer are all solved by shipping the Robox to CEL.
But …
I still think after 4 years that CEL did not deliver. The promise was more than 3D printing. We still have a desktop 3D printer only, much improved since the first versions but it is not a micro manufacturing platform as promised. What is even worse is that other manufacturers do support multiple function in one device.
Future …
Starting a company is pretty hard, but keeping it alive is even harder. CEL disappointed customers by promising a micro manufacturing platform and delivering a reasonable 3D printer. Complaints by clients are fully justified. As much as I like the Robox I think my next 3D printer will not be a CEL printer.
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This reply was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by
Microcan.
Hi, This is Lee from CEL UK support, I never post on the forum but due to this post being started as a result of a repair carried out by myself I would like a chance to explain the situation in this instance.
I much prefer to use the support portal as it is easier to tailor a response to a customers specific issue, but that said I am aware of the experience on this forum from robox users is massive and a great place to go when support is out of hours.
This complaint raises from a customer who reported a head leaking from one of the nozzles. The customer was asked if material was visible above the heatblock and the response was no which makes this a repairable fault with adjustment of the needle or replacement of the nozzle.The head was returned to us for repair and because the head was out of warranty this repair was chargeable. The head was opened on arrival and the area around the seals inspected for signs of leaks of which there were none. The nozzle was replaced and the head then calibrated and tested with no further leak from the nozzle which was the original fault reported. The area around the seals were again checked before the head was returned. At no point in the repair were the seals replaced as this is not possible on a SM print head.
Unfortunately the seals did fail a few prints after return, but this cannot have been predicted by us and would not have been affected by the repair we preformed.
When the customer reported the head issue to us the issue sounded like a different issue than a leaking seal and so we began to make checks on his machine. After none of these fixed the issue I recommended the machine to be returned to us for inspection/repair. Due to the machine being out of warranty and so chargeable the customer demanded I give him remote instructions on checks to preform. During one of these checks the customer damaged a cable on his machine and then believed CEL to be at fault for this.
This has lead to where we are now and the customer began to become personal on tickets and spamming the support portal with multiple tickets which began to effect our ability to help other customers.
I regret that this has got to this point, I help many users daily and find it upsetting that in my 2 .5 years with robox this is the first time I have had to defend my actions. We at CEL do value our customers and where possible will always try to help all customers in or out of warranty with the best or most cost effective way of keeping their machines running.
Thanks
LeeBowman
Robox Support Engineer
As I said my experience with support is very good. Sometimes clients are not happy with the solution you propose. The problems with forums is that people who read the forum only hear one side of the story. Good to hear your side.
I don’t think Mike and certainly I needed @bhudson nor @leecel to defend their work. Nobody said that they are not doing good job and their advice is intrinsically bad. I mentioned my experience only to counter perceived claims (from first couple of posts) of @bhudson that support is infallible. We are all human and it is OK for some mistakes to be made and most of the time (as @bhudson said - all those unheard stories) I suspect things are sorted out in the best possible way for all parties.
What I think Mike tried to do is to draw attention to bad PR - not bad support or service. Of course we do receive such stories with pinch of salt and can relatively easily extrapolate where the problem is (I don’t expect @bhudson stealing anyone’s Robox - of all people he need extra Roboxes the least 😉 - I suspect problem was in breakdown in communications and printer physically remained in the workshop for some reason). In the same way I understand who hard can be for someone to accept that after sending head to the service it fails immediately when he got it back. So instead of paying £160 for the new head - he landed with bill of £220! And nobody can blame him for feeling slightly done for. Realistically - done by original problem SM heads had - blowing seals at random moment, which, after all, if we are fair, is not what ordinary customer would expect when originally bought the printer.
There in such cases some ‘human’ touch (which I quite understand might need to be taken away from technicians - and I am talking from my personal experience here) wouldn’t go amiss. Isn’t that what Mike aimed at? And again - I don’t think this is about blaming people who are fixing printers all day long… More like drawing attention to what can be done in some other areas (customer care? or whatever marketing doubletalk is to be used here) to avoid such dramatic and damaging (for CEL) turn of events.
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This reply was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by
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