Am I alone in getting aggravated by the form you need to fill out in detail every time you open a support case? Language, country, where you bought the machine, etc?
Don’t they have a database that would give them all they need, once you provide your name and the machine serial number?
Maybe I’m so sensitive because I’ve had to open so many cases (my brandy new 3L needed new firmware, since it came with fw from early this year, 6 revs out of date. Which prevented network connectivity. Fixed that after I rounded up a 12 year old laptop that had a USB port to connect with the provided cable. (newsflash!! USB C has arrived). Next, I need to wait for a new base plate for the resin cart, which I have to install myself.
After which we’ll deal with the init timing out when I have to recycle the machine.
It’s apparently too much to ask to remember my details. It’s a waste of my time, and a stupid, disrespectful, thoughtless, annoying thing. FL centric, instead of paying attention to how a customer feels.
Thanks for taking the time to post this. It sounds like you’ve got plenty of very legitimate reasons to feel frustrated.
I know it’s scant comfort at this point, but we’ve passed your thoughts along to our Services and CX teams because I think this is a really fair suggestion.
There are a ton of moving parts when it comes to how we track incoming service issues, so I’m not able to guarantee that processes will change drastically right away or anything like that, but the last thing we want is for our long-time customers to feel like they aren’t being heard or respected, so my personal apologies for that, as well as apologies on behalf of the team. We always do our best to help folks as efficiently as we can, but clearly there’s still some room for improvement.
As always, thanks for being an involved member of the community and for pushing us to do better.
Formlabs used to have a really awesome ticket system at tickets.formlabs.com. You could even log in and view all your open tickets. I used that interface extensively to keep track of my support issues and to send detailed descriptions without the loss of fidelity that occurs over email.
They got rid of it a few years ago and the present system doesn’t even come close. I open new cases now by just sending an email to support@formlabs.com. That’s the easiest, but be sure to include all the relevant information which would ordinarily be collected by that annoying form.
Alternate perspective - FL has always done a fine job of meeting and/or exceeding my expectations on support. They were responsive when I bought my Form1+, never really had a problem with my Form2, and while I have had a few issues with my Form3 I have no complaints about how they handled them.
And I manage enterprise customer technical support for a large international electronic component manufacturer, so my expectations are pretty high.