RedTeam

Generally, dealing with vendor support sucks. Either you have someone who doesn’t understand your problem or they tell you that it is not covered by the support contract. We were therefore pleasantly surprised that this is not always the case.

Some weeks ago, we had a problem with the laser printer at RedTeam’s headquarters. It started to smear toner on the page in some places. The vendor had an online chat for support questions. We decided to at least try and get someone competent, as usually these support chats don’t have the reputation of being very helpful.

We were very suprised that shortly after giving our chat partner our telephone number, the phone rang. The support staff was very helpful and let us measure the distance between the edge of the paper sheet and the first smear. He instantly knew that this was a problem of the exposure module fuser. Instead of trying to sell us a new one, he proceeded to instruct us on how to clean it:

Cleaning the fuser

After the cleaning, the printer worked again as expected. But this is not the end of the story. Some days later, the Fax/Scanning machine from the very same vendor broke down. After calling them and detailing the problem, they gave us instructions on how to get some more informations from the machine (we now know how to get into admin mode…) and send it to them. One day later, we got the call that they will send us a new machine, as the old one can’t be fixed. All this without any further questions or trying to blame us for the error.

So, either we were lucky or there are still vendors with decent customer support. The name of the vendor? HP. Not a small one, as you can see. I really hope others will follow their example.

Update: a colleague told me that it was the fuser, not the exposure module which had the problem.