Robox (CEL) support total failure

[pelgrim]

you got a few assumtions wrong.

It is not good that you have come away from this whole experience with a bad feeling. But we would like to say, remember that people are people and that it is very unlikely that any mistakes that you feel they have made are the result of some nefarious or underhanded attitude. Companies do not forego good customer support for a quick buck (although it does depend on the business model).

Never said they do.
I was given the wrong advice, time and again.
If I was an isolated case, you could indeed doubt that.
Just stroll on the CEL forum, you will discover there is at least one individual at their help desk that gets it wrong on a regular basis.
As far for their business model, they do very questionable things.
Let users do open source work in their free time and not intervening.
Then just "oops" dropping all compability with that work done where there was no reason to do so: work down the drain.
I'm not talking about myself here, I refused to do any work until I got the support from CEL, which we of course never got.
Making a quick buck seems exactly the way they are going for the last 6 months, their latest products show that clearly.

As to the question of whether they should have repaired it or told you to buy a new one. It's not really advisable to give advice to customers because they can come back at you - "you said I should do this and it didn't work" (for them).

1. they didn't give me the option to buy a new print head, you can bet on it because they are for some obscure reason without new print heads for 6 months now or so
2. support stated themselves AFTERWARDS, when the damage was done, that this seal breaking was nothing more then natural, because the print head was way out of life expectancy.
Answer me honestly: do you ask a customer to repair part that is long past it's end of life ?

You have to remember that you own the machine, you are the decision maker, it's your responsibility. The manufacturer and seller have responsibilities, which in our experience they are happy to take on, but there is only so much responsibility they can shoulder, and I don't mean from a legal perspective but from a moral perspective.

does not fit the philosophy they pretend with their marketing: just print out of the box, robox does it all for you, no knowledge required.
You could not expect some good advise from support, if you market this way, you MUST advise your customer.
Go repair your car, you will get GOOD advise from your local dealer, it will not be "your the owner, we leave it all up to you".

So, with respect to the forum, I think that depends on how much a nuisance you were making of yourself. If you were trolling across all threads, regardless of their relevancy to your grievance, then yes it would probably be a good idea to ban you because then you are spoiling it all for everyone else. If you have your own thread then I don't see why they did it.

I defended my case in an orderly fashion, they refused to take any kind of responsibility, so when they begin to loose face, they ban you.
I'm not the first.

So I guess the question is how would you like this to end so that you came away satisfied, then ask yourself the question as to whether that would be a justifiable expectation. I include the last part as it is our experience that people's expectations for what would satisfy them can be sometimes unrealistic; "I want 10 new 3D printers and an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas". I'm not saying your expectations are not justified by the way.

LOL
I asked them for a reasonable compensation for their mistakes, in those exact words.
Never got an offer ...

But what I expected was very reasonable:
- compensate the £60 wrongly spend on repairing an end of life part
- perform an inspection of my printer since some damage was done, explicit on their advice and executed exactly as they asked, with photo's given to support on each step.

If they would have done this I would have been happy buying a new print head when they finally have them back on their shelves.
In stead they went deaf and banned me.
Just banned ?
No, they closed all channels, also support, I have no way of contacting them anymore, since I don't live in the UK.

Justifiable expectations ?
Curious what you think of it and if you would agree with this yourself when you run a support team that had this experience.

They would still have a happy customer that advocates their product, like I did for the last 3 years.
Right now I advice everyone I know to stay away from robox.
Being connected to a fablab, this counts for something. Not much, but every bit helps, right ?