I'm not complaining so much, as expressing amazement.
Ran into a print problem installing a brand new MF644Cdw printer. Print from PCs would fail "out of paper", however copy and print from USB work.
My triage indicated a problem with the driver or the print job properties.
I was a bit surprised to find out that Canon only provided phone help during weekdays, for 8 hours or so. Within an hour the call wait time was >30 minutes, within 2 hours it was >40 minutes, and within 3 hours was >60 minutes, and stayed that way for the rest of the service hours.
I'm a product of the period in history when big U.S. companies got a wake-up call from foreign competition. For companies like Motorola and Harley Davidson, the competition came from Japan. For Boeing, it was Airbus.
As management, we were emersed in a period when we had the "benefit" of a real threat. Motorola and Harley were already seeing more highly-priced competitive products taking their loyal market share. The wrinkle that Japanese companies brought was a markedly lower defect rate. Boeing's market share "wake-up" was about cost.
During that period, about 1980-1995, there was a lot of thinking about "quality" topics, certainly including "customer satisfaction" and "employee satisfaction". These somewhat elusive topics spent most of their early life in the form of "1-Highly Satisfied to 5-Highly Dissatisfied" questionaire/survey. At the time, organizations had limited understanding of how to use the data simply because it was being asked in the context of real threats.
An important insight into customer and employee satisfaction came when research indicated there was something beyond the 1-5 metric. Customers, for example, had a "loyalty" attribute (I'll buy my shoes at Nordstroms vs. I'll only buy my shoes at Nordstroms). They also had a "disloyality" attribute (I'll never buy....). Calling them "advocates" and "opponents", this emotional attachment had a far greater impact on the company's bottom lime that the difference between a fully satisfied and a fully dissatisfied customer. Advocates and opponents tend to tell their friends.
The analysis also discovered that the best, and perhaps only, points where customers can be moved toward advocate is at the touch points between employees and customers. A help desk is certainly one of those touch points.
My first experience with Canon help and support for intallation issues, has moved me to opponent. It's unimaginable that a company with the long history of Canon, tolerate call service performance I experienced.
As an opponent, one of the options I'm considering is just returning the printer. In the bigger scheme of things, its $300 price makes it of low impact, but, it becomes part of the story of Canon I'll tell. I've already contaminated my wife, who also was a manager during the same quality "revolution".
The tragedy is the link found between employee and customer satisfaction: they can't be managed separately. As powerful as my experience was, I can only imagine a very horrible place in Canon to work.
This is the second laser for our home use, and the first all-in-one printer. We had a Lexmark that ran great for close to a decade. Had both the option to buy again from Lexmark or stop into a local office supply (Staples). One day, was in a local Staples, and bought the printer plus a complete ink set. Had it shipped directly to the home. Pretty heavy, but got it up to where the old laser was.
Bought the Staples maintenance plan, so actually tried them before trying Canon. The interface was chat, but they kinda stopped responding as I described the issue and the testing. Not only does Canon tech support suck, so does the one provided by one of your retailers.
Everything smells of a company that has no customer satisfaction culture, which also means, no employee satisfaction culture. Why would I want to support such an organization by buying their products?
You've created a highly dissatisfied opponent. And, if I can't figure out the problem in the next few days, you'll also get your printer back (scarp and rework) and lose the future supply revenues.
