Dear Formlabs,
Having owned your products for 5 years running and attended your user conference, I’ve had the opportunity to meet many of your employees - from your startup team in the Kickstarter days, to your fantastic support staff, to the engineers that pour their sweat and tears into conceiving and building some of the best 3D printers on the market.
I’ve generally been very impressed with the dedication, passion, efficiency and knowledge of the people I meet. It’s consistently clear the family you’ve put together is made up of people excited about 3D printing who truly care about your customers’ success. I’ve never had cause to disparage an employee until now.
For the first time, I have to report a Formling I just can’t stand: the HelpBot.
My beefs (in order encountered):
- Despite my 2560x1600 pixel monitor it interacts with me through a tiny little 550x500 portal
- Constant need to scroll the applet after every response (or wait for the delayed scroll animation to run)
- Questions asked and responses provided aren’t particularly meaningful. I’ve yet to have it solve my problem, and I always end up at the “Contact Support” prompt. All it does in practice is delay me from opening my ticket.
- Not enough space in the box where I type in my actual problem. Yes, you can resize the height, but that’s only thanks to a saint working for one of the major browser vendors who introduced
::-webkit-resizer. - Doesn’t maintain fidelity of the content I type. It butchers my paragraph spacing, adds a bunch of unwanted, boilerplate text (some of it bordering on advertising) and in general jumbles my submission. The first time I used it, I wound up deleting the HelpBot-created ticket and recreating it by hand the normal way.
- All tickets opened by HelpBot have the subject “Customer feedback from your virtual agent” which makes them impossible to distinguish when viewed under My Activities
- It’s just generally annoying, unwanted and a little intrusive
You can tell Erik Pfannmöller at Solvemate GmbH that in my opinion his product feels like it was designed by someone who set out with best intentions but wound up creating an evil AI intent on inflicting economic (time wasted) and ergonomic harm to its users. Maybe it’s inconsequential if you just have to go through the wizard once in your life, but after a few times it starts to feel like death by a thousands cuts. The efforts and fees Formlabs spends on it might be better used expanding, curating and maintaining a well-organized collection of documentation, FAQ’s, videos, etc.
Granted, I don’t have the whole picture. Perhaps this little bot is saving hundreds of man-hours of support time at formlabs HQ. To enlighten myself, I have a question for the community:
Is there a single person here who actually LIKES the Helpbot and found it solved their problem?
For that matter, what do the support staff think of their automated coworker?
To Formlabs: Please be mindful of how many obstacles you put in the path of someone trying to get help*, and never get rid of the traditional way to open tickets. You have a stellar track record in terms of support; prize that and protect it!
(*e.g. I’ve noticed more and more fields pop up on the traditional open-a-ticket form. Do you really need a shipping address up front? Oftentimes nothing needs to be shipped, and in my experience your agents always ask the recipient to manually confirm it anyway, rightly so since it’s important to get correct, and it’s always possible the person moved in the time elapsed since the ticket was opened).
