Honest customer service question

CNC Machines Shapeoko 5 Pro
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I have been treated respectfully throughout my short interaction period with Carbide, and responses have been reasonably quick (no one ever answers phone, but they email within a few hours generally) which is very appreciated.

However, I don’t really see the action to go with that contact. They sent me my machine with no collets. I built it on Saturday, and notified them then, so I get that they would not address until Monday and the post office was closed.

I was told yesterday the items were in stock and would be expedited. It is now end of day Tuesday (PST) and nothing has been dropped in the mail yet to fulfill the order. Have emailed and called a few times today, with no response. They may be tired of hearing from me, but they could fix it by putting my collet in the mail.

So my question - Is this a case of a growing company that does not have staffing to meet demand, or a declining culture there? I have several folks I know very interested in buying a machine like mine and I am not sure if I should recommend or not.

Not throwing rocks, just trying to see if there is a trend or behavior pattern.

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We had to shift to a single queue for phone callbacks and email. We had the problem where a relative few customers would call back all day long and starve out every normal call and email. The shift to a single queue has been a net win in response time, but we’d still like to go back to having open phone lines. It’s not clear how we can do that without a big bump in support headcount.

We shut down Nomad production to move to more VFD’s, and one of the guys didn’t know to put collets in about 30 units. Of course, we didn’t know which 30 so we couldn’t do much proactively.

I have no idea what’s going on with the shipping on your collets(I’m out of town this week), but I just sent a note to make sure they’re out today.

It’s the former. We have a new support person starting today, and we’re still going through resumes for another. We just added another full-time shipping person.

Since Covid, our trend line is really unpredictable- wildly up and wildly down. We’re fundamentally conservative about hiring and expenditures because we’re entirely bootstrapped. We end up lagging on hires so we don’t overextend until we’re sure any growth is here to stay.

The other (new and growing) problem is 2nd hand machines that people buy, sometimes in horrible condition, and then email with “Hey, I got this Shapeoko 3. Can you show me how to use it?” We’re trying to invest more in documentation and training materials this year to offload some of this, because it’s not sustainable to go through the support process over and over for the same machines.

The “correct” decision might be to bump prices an hire a lot of people but I don’t think we have the guts for that.

You can take all of that for what it’s worth; I just wanted to give some inside info.

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Update.

Rob gave me the personal response above, which I thought was honest and fair.

And after talking to sales, my parts are being overnighted to me, so I can make my deadline.

My concerns are squashed and I will strongly recommend my friends to buy a machine from them.

Thank you Carbide for your help.

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why didn’t you just order from Amazon if deadline is important?

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We made the mistake, we should fix it, if possible.

(But I understand the sentiment)

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When I contacted Carbide they told me that poor quality collets could cause cut issues, so I was worried about that.

I did look though, but live in the middle of nowhere and Amazon showed Monday the 26th for delivery. Which if you look at a calendar that is after this weekend. I drove 50 miles to town and went to 5 stores , with no luck. Even tried a machine shop guy I know.

Not all of us live in a city, and getting the right thing delivered is pretty vital, but thanks for the input.

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You might have luck with the “Find a Distributor” link for a major tooling vendor — using the one for Harvey Tools I was able to find a shop in a reasonably small town (admittedly across the river from the state capital).

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Awesome. That is great advice. Thank you. I will use that tip.

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I have the questions as you. I needed support one other time and the experience was ok. Between going back and forth with emails it took about a week to solve the issue. Then about another week to receive my parts. This time I sent an email on Sunday and got a response on Monday requesting I send a video. I did that within an hour. Have not heard back yet. I sent a follow up email several hours ago and have not heard anything back. I really can’t afford to be down for two weeks every time I have a machine issue. I’m contemplating buying a bunch of replacement parts so I don’t have to wait on responses. I really like carbide 3d and support their growth but think it is ridiculous that all customers need to go through the growing pains with them.

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It might be an idea with the older machines to declare an end-of-life for support, and refer questions to youtube tutorials or forums. There’s a lot of good info online, but some (older) people don’t want to invest the time to research and learn online, instead insisting on live contacts. I’m the opposite, I hate talking to people and would rather spend days learning how to do things on my own.

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For whatever reason, the support queue has been brutal this week. I’ve spent about half of my time in there helping out to try and help (but I’m not great at support, so I cherry pick the easy ones)

Our support system, Help Scout, has a quirk that’s a flaw for us in your case. If you send a new reply to a ticket, it bumps it to the top of the queue so that it looks like a new ticket and we try to work on the oldest tickets first. There doesn’t seem to be a way to change this, and the real fix is to not have a queue at all, which is why we just hired two more support folks.

We’ve talked about that. If we wanted to do that, the minimum time seems to be 10 years to us, which doesn’t do much to help for the forseeable future.

What we’ve looked at, but not tackled yet, is to have a layer over Help Scout that would go over the tickets and sort them by ticket age, but applying a correction factor to give higher priority for brand new machines at one extreme, and lower priority for 2nd-hand, older machines.

We like this because it add some order to the chaos and it’s tweakable. Solving a problem with automation is our favorite approach. (We already had to write our own voicemail to transcription to support ticket system to get those into the queue more efficiently and it’s been a huge win)

Ultimately, everyone thinks their problem is top priority, and there’s a lot of truth to that.

To be fair, a lot of people don’t have the vocabulary in CNC to know what to look for so they’re not able to help themselves. We have some ideas for Carbide Motion to help with this problem, and we just had an all-day meeting last week to rethink all of our training material. It’ll take some time, but I think it’ll be a good iteration.

You and me both. But we’re the minority.

The number of folks that demand to talk to someone on the phone, when their problem cannot be handled there, or could be handled in 2 minutes via email, is shockingly high.

In the abstract, this is all a fun optimization problem. In reality, it’s less fun.

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I may be caught in that que bump. I’m 48 hrs post my last response from support, but I added data to my email response to a initial support team request for a video and photos. I’m intimately familiar to customer service and tech support challenges that customers can create and I’m confident my issue will get resolved, but it can be a little frustrating when you pony up $4K and can’t get up and running and don’t get a fairly quick response. Understanding why helps.

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I haven’t heard of any other place where the CEO of a company gets right in the forums and talks about how their processes are working, or not working, and what they’re shooting for to fix it. This in my opinion is one of the factors that makes me a big fan. So kudos to you all.

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If you need a remote IT guy with manufacturing support experience let me know! You can try me out for however many hours a VFD and spindle costs.

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I’ll just add my 2c, because no one asked. I’ve had my ProXL for a couple of years and have had to use customer service minimally. But I did have an issue with my cutter. The parts that I needed were included in my “spare parts bag” which I couldn’t locate. The next day, a new cutter arrived on my doorstep. I was about two weeks beyond my official “warranty expiration date”, yet they took care of all of this between Saturday and Monday morning. I’ve emailed other questions, with quick responses and have had zero problems with my machine, as I’ve seen others have (knock on wood). I bought my Shapeoko over other brands because they are a smaller company, but also very passionate about their product. I feel like each one that they ship out is like them sending their own baby into the world and they care about your machine like it is their own. The downside is that they have created a lot of babies that all need a little milk. BTW Rob (if you are reading this), I live in Redondo and would be happy to volunteer some hours for you guys.

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To follow up, I got my parts and went to work.

This thing is Freaking awesome!

All the video support from Carbide and help on this forum has me got off and running.

Great tool, and from what I can tell so far, exceptional quality.

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So I’ll just say, I’ve had my S4 XXL for a couple years now, and have had a couple interactions with C3D support. While I haven’t always been left jumping for joy, I’ve always been treated fairly and been helped in a reasonable amount of time.

As a (now former) business owner, I really empathize with C3D’s staffing and support challenges. axis81’s comment of “I really like carbide 3d and support their growth but think it is ridiculous that all customers need to go through the growing pains with them” is a point well taken, but I worry is also a bit impractical. C3D sits in a sweet spot between professional and consumer grade tools in that the machines are reliable, effective, easy to use, and can function in a production environment, however they are inexpensive enough that hobbyists can afford them.

I actually bought mine when I cashed out of my company, because I lost access to the bigger industrial tools I’d gotten used to. Why do I bring this up? Because, when you get into commercial tools for production, you can get into situations where a tool down can cost tens of thousands of dollars an hour, and so you can purchase exactly the types of support contracts you’re implying you want. The trick? They’re also hella expensive, because you’re paying for a lot of staff. I think C3D does a good job of walking that fine line of providing support while keeping their tools affordable, nobody gets left out in the cold. For me personally, it was that mix of good documentation, good performance, good support, good community, and very affordable price that got me in the door. :person_shrugging:

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I’ve built, used and still use a number of 2D/3D machines over the last decade or so – printers, laser engravers and mechanical cutters. None of these have been critical to my livelihood, but all have been fun to build and operate. None has ever come close to the level of company support that Carbide 3D has provided – especially at this price point. I work in an IT department and we pride ourselves on supporting our users – but we’re not there.

There are definite pros and cons to providing a complete solution like my current 5Pro and VFD spindle. Designing, building and maintaining everything from the CAD/CAM software, electronics and electrical, mechanics and tooling – plus the extensive training/tutorials – leaves a LOT to support. That only gets worse as the legacy support needs grow with time and as the type of user expands with the type of machine marketed. There is a pyramid growing at both ends.

This is my opinion only:

The mechanical design and parts used are generally excellent, and if well-maintained the machine should last a lifetime. You already go a long way by providing maintenance parts kits. I’d also like to see an honest list based on frequency of support requests for the screws that tend to work loose and the parts that will wear out regardless of maintenance (but quicker if not maintained). Ideally provide it along with the symptoms and signs if they loosen or wear. A self-support list (or wiki) for these common things may save a significant numbers of calls. We (as forum users) may even be able to help.

The software and software maintenance are exceptional. Ditto for the tutorials. It really doesn’t leave a lot of space for improvement.

The electricals and electronics are by far your weakest area.

From what we get to see on the forum, they represent a frequent (and expensive) source of service calls. Many are avoidable.

I don’t expect to buy a $5000 package and have loose wires bundled with a few twists of adhesive tape, extensions 4 feet long for the 2 feet model, need gender changing pigtails for the VFD cable, have unlabeled connectors for the BitSetter/BitZero, etc. And Micro-Fit crimped connector pins aren’t meant to carry heavy cable weights.

My first connector problem came with the machine’s arrival. It was fixed by replacing the attached Y1 limit switch (no connector attached, just 3 bare wires) with the provided spare – without needing to place a service call. This was just poor QA. It happens. Providing the spare saved you a call. Kudos!

My only support request was around 6 months into use. It was for a wire gradually pulling out of a badly crimped Molex connector pin on the switch connector to the controller, aided by the weight of the harness. Carbide provided a rapid replacement (entire wiring harness) - helped by knowing the problem and my sending the supporting information and pictures along with the service request email. It also prompted me to expand my own toolkit with Mini-Pin and Micro-Pin connectors, pins and a good crimping tool – just in case.

These kinds of details should have been ironed out in development. Expandable cable covering is cheap and protective. Cable support to take cable weight off the crimped connectors is a lot cheaper than tying up service reps and replacing cable harnesses and attached drag chains.

All of us on the forum see the problems with the electronics – with the posts on the forum concerning a variety of control boards including the Warthog, the VFD controller and the front panel board. From my viewpoint, they go a lot deeper than the acknowledged assembly problems. Here are just a few examples.

  • Rather than marking the heatsink as “Hot” on the Warthog (and it certainly is very hot), fix the underlying problem. My other controllers’ 4 x TMC2160 drivers run similar motors at 24V and the same currents with significantly smaller heatsinks and all run below 45C. Heat and heat cycles are the enemy of electronics reliability.

  • Unless the aim is to deliberately lock out use of 3rd party VFDs and spindles, fix the spindle output circuit on the Warthog to not need a workaround on the VFD board (and to reduce its complexity and likelihood of failure).

Fixing these (and other) design problems would potentially free up your service reps and cut down on the shipping of expensive replacement parts. I’m sure there are many of us here who would willingly volunteer to help with suggestions.

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What the hell does age have to do with anything?

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Plenty. People who grew up without the internet are more comfortable using a phone to get information.

In 20 years I will be the old guy screaming at the AI customer support, wishing somebody would just code a website with the answers I need.

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