Lame situation with a customer, how do you handle this?

[activeits]

Never get involved in a situation like this. Make suggestions, let them purchase.

Totally agree, I remember when I first started in business, I had a couple of customers say "why do you not sell computers, because I could then get free support for the first year of you, because it would be covered under warranty" They honestly thought a computer should come with 24/7 free software support.

I did not want to get into that minefield, explaining if it is a software issue they had created, then it is not covered by the manufacturers hardware warranty.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Oh my god so I had her send me a sample of what the problem is, one printed from her HP and one printed from the new brother. The brother print is certainly lighter, but she never said color print quality was one of her requirements. The printer I got her fulfills literally everything she needs but the print on it is lighter than the HP, and honestly, if she didn't have the HP to compare it to she wouldn't know the difference.

Top is HP bottom is Brother, apparently the brother is set to best in the image below.

 

[OaksLabs]

I'm no expert on the demonic beasts (aka printers) but that looks like a contrast issue -- and I would suspect it can be adjusted in the settings somewhere (but make sure you charge for your time configuring it!).

 

[thecomputerguy]

I'm no expert on the demonic beasts (aka printers) but that looks like a contrast issue -- and I would suspect it can be adjusted in the settings somewhere (but make sure you charge for your time configuring it!).

Thank you for this, I think you might be right, I found an article online to adjust all of the color settings, I forwarded it to her to mess with.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Well she said she adjusted it and nothing changed ... great

 

[ohio_grad_06]

It's not that bad, just different. Tell her hit the road imo.

Maybe this helps.

http://www.brother-usa.com/FAQs/Solution.aspx?FAQID=200000017964&ProductID=hl2140&Keyword=

This is specific to that printer.

http://support.brother.com/g/b/faqe...rod=mfcj6920dw_us_eu_as&faqid=faq00002538_012

May have her check how it's set in the driver as to what type of paper it thinks it is using etc. Also it mentions looking at the color mode. Also you may need to look at things as she may not know what she's looking at. Maybe you can do a remote session?

 

[glennd]

Well she said she adjusted it and nothing changed ... great

People lie....

 

[Markverhyden]

Well she said she adjusted it and nothing changed ... great

Did she tell you or did you ask if she needed to print photographs?

 

[red12049]

I find it a bit hard to believe that something you've probably done yourself at a big box store is causing you this much grief.

I don't like returns either, but this is what people have gotten used to. I can pretty much guarantee that any big store would have just handed her her money back, apologized for her trouble (perhaps), and been done with it.

Hopefully, this experience will help you make up your mind whether you wish to continue selling and supporting this type of hardware.

Rick

 

[glennd]

Hopefully, this experience will help you make up your mind whether you wish to continue selling and supporting this type of hardware.

I know I won't go there when people are going down the road to the Post Office where they can pick up a nice general purpose printer for $39! I can't imagine why they bother, there can't be any profit in it.

 

[fencepost]

I'll add my voice to those avoiding purchasing / reselling printers. We still do it, but I think printers like that have cost us more in lost time and headaches than any profit we've gotten from markup.

I'll spend a reasonable amount of time (sometimes too much) researching since we also are charging a monthly fee, but mostly in terms of looking at what has good reviews and meets their stated needs plus what I know of how they're going to use the printer along with experience with similar printers elsewhere. After doing that, I'll send them recommendations with 2-3 links for each printer steering them to the best reputable-vendor price including Newegg, Staples/OfficeDepotMax (for items regularly on sale) or even Costco. Where there's "Free Prime Shipping" I'll include an Amazon affiliate link, but (nearly-)free shipping seems pretty ubiquitous these days on $300+ printers and I'm not sure anyone's ever actually used one of those links.

As an example of possible gotcha's, I'm careful about recommending the Brother mono lasers into high-volume environments because of the 100,000 page lifespan (@ 100k they request PF and Laser replacement, IIRC, 60k for color) and I'll make sure people know that. You can still use the printers (one customer has one with >250k pages on it though it's mighty creaky), but I'll explain it as a 100,000 page "maintenance kit" that happens to be the whole printer. The replacement procedure for those parts starts with "Get your original packaging materials out."

I also won't recommend the Lexmark MX310dn for anyone - we've put two in and both have been trouble though our use case is maybe a little outside the norm. One had the ADF rollers wear out around 14k pages(!), and both were squirrely about forwarding received faxes via FTP - as in, something about a particular received fax causes the FTP process for faxes only to hang in the printer and the only fix is to change it to "Print and Forward" then restart with the network cable out to clear the received fax queue by printing everything and its FTP error pages.

And of course for people who want scanning from their networked multifunction, I'm wary about HP - I've seen too many of those that scan beautifully to the HP software bundle running on a desktop but where the option of scanning to a not-logged-in server was completely unavailable.

 

[Digital Sage]

I had a customer tell me she wanted a new AIO printer for the office because her ADF on her cheap HP AIO was mis-feeding. I recommended a couple printers to her (I'm a brother fan) in the $200-$300 price range because she didn't want to pay any extra for an entry line laser. She took it upon herself to lookup every model I recommended and turned them down based on the specs/reviews.

She had certain requirements for the printer:

A decently fast ADF
Decently fast printing
Ability to scan to network folder (which not all printers have)
Ability to store faxes in network folder (which not all printers have)
Shorter profile but with 2 trays
Duplex & Wireless

Searching for her was a PITA but I finally found a decent AIO, and sent it over to her and she looked through the specs/reviews and approved it and I ordered it because I could make a little money off the product and replacement ink in addition to the install.

Went with this: http://www.amazon.com/Brother-MFCJ6...l_reviews&filterByStar=all_stars&pageNumber=2

I go and install it and hour and half later, she's happy, it fulfills everything she asked for above.

She spams my phone with a bunch of text messages today, "The color print quality seems slightly washed out".
"The quality is faded even though I put it to best print quality", "I don't like the quality of the color it's faded", "How do we return it?"

So I don't really even know why color is such a huge issue since this is a business install that I never would have guessed they needed super high quality color prints (they are farmers) and color quality was not a requirement she asked for.

However it fulfills EVERY OTHER REQUIREMENT she asked for.

I guess my F-up is ordering it for her to make a couple bucks off the sale of it, but I haven't ran into this issue with a client in 10 years, they usually just do with what I recommend them.

So now if she wont budge on keeping it, I have to drive 30 minutes both ways, pick this printer up, re-package it (thank god I kept the box for this reason), and restart this whole process again.

Also I see an issue with the labor, it's already time I invested into a printer she agreed with me on to install, and now she doesn't want it and I don't want to refund her my time to install it.

How do you handle this?

She chose it via your recommendations. It was her call. Can you even return it after the inks been returned?

Some customers are like this. What's with the spamming on the SMS? Surely a phone call would be sufficient. She sounds like a royal PITA. If a customer starts SMS'ing me constantly, i'll divorce them.

 

[Matthew Bradley]

Selling printers reminds me of one of my first jobs at a Radio Shack and selling car audio. You cringed every time you sold something because about 80% of the units were returned. The other 20% complained so much you wished they would just return it. If its not a commercial grade printer, we pretty much just pass those jobs off to the local pizza techs. They are awful.