Peripherals forum: Xerox NOT for small businesses

Interesting that someone has deleted the response I made here regarding Xerox's VERY STRONG customer satisfaction policy.

They have a 3 year full customer satisfaction guarantee. I believe that is the best in the industry.

If you aren't being satisfied you can get your purchase back or, I believe, even have Xerox replace the printer or copier with an equivalent other-company product.

Hello, ChuckT

You wouldn't just happen to be a Xerox man, would you? Your suggestion for following through is commendable but just how far do you have to go with Xerox? This is our experience.

We had the misfortune of buying a Xerox Phaser 7400 from a Xerox concessionaire in Limoges in France almost exactly 3 years ago, confident that our satisfaction with this marque in the past, would be repeated.

Not so by a long way and then some.

The printer arrived damaged and unworking; it was fixed but started going through consumables at twice the rate advertised; the suggested monthly cycle of 150,000 was absolute nonsense; it was impossible to order consumables via the French Xerox website at the time and everywhere we tried to get the necessary consumables to meet our typical output of 50,000 copies a month we received the response of 'out of stock' or the order could only be partially completed. The service delays were deplorable; the suggestion that a technician would come out in under a day was once again, total nonsense. Typical down-time in reality was 3 - 5 days, depending upon whether a weekend was looming. Technical competence varied from OK at best to downright useless, with ourselves having to diagnose and fix problems on more than one occasion.

However, much more serious was Xerox's attitude to replacing those consumables which were either defective or failing to give the necessary output either in terms of quality or quantity. According to Xerox (France), they will only replace defective consumables if they are less than 3 months old. This seems to be irrespective of the actual consumption realized, whether corroborated by the machine's own usage readings or not.

This in our view, is an out-and-out scam; at 3 months, a consumable can still be showing a considerable amount of life left and should be replaced if defective even after 12 months, let alone 3. Nor is this subject to interpretation; the machine will obligingly print out a usage sheet for you which states in black and white (or colour, if you are lucky!) what the position is.

This is particularly problematic where there are as many consumables as you will find in a modern printer in our case, with only just over 150,000 copies on the counter in 2 years - a fraction of our normal output - we have gone through more than 30 'hard' consumables, excluding toners.

The cost is significant, as Xerox well knows.

Yet, after almost exactly two years of our badgering the company with requests to replace faulty consumables, the company arbitrarily reneged on the 3 year extended onsite warranty we had taken out with the purchase of the printer and to this day, the machine stands there, awaiting repairs and of no use to man nor beast. No refund of the money paid for the guarantee was offered or any other arrangement in lieu. Another scam, therefore, as the refusal to undertake further servicing was clearly premeditated and is known to both Xerox and their concessionaire.

We eventually took our complaints right to the top of the Xerox complaints hierarchy in France but to no avail. Although they sent out a so-called 'inspector' who confirmed to us that just about every necessary working part in the printer was defective and needed replacing, the matter ended there, despite us sending a reminder letter to Xerox by recorded delivery, 4 weeks later.

We were offered a second-hand replacement printer by the concessionaires but it had a long history of breakdowns (which they tried to conceal) and it was immediately apparent the machine couldn't handle our workload. It was sold with a maintenance agreement which once again was just a sheet of lies and so incompetent was the servicing, that it took almost two months for Xerox to get the thing fully up-and-running.

We then received an invoice for a fictitious set of counter-totals, which we had to engage a public notary to contest, followed by our solicitor, to persuade the company, after six months, to get their garbage off our premises.

In the latter stages of these events, we received a statement from the concessionaires which includes - hang on for this - a bill for an extended on-site mainenance warranty - which we paid for when we bought the machine - plus amounts for consumables also already paid for at the time of purchase, plus various sums for a handful of defective consumables awaiting collection.

Although we have over 100 pages of correspondence with Xerox and its concessionaire relating to this disgusting affair, let alone dozens of reams of wasted output, we do not see that Xerox has any intention of exercising any goodwill in this matter and so we are passing our file onto the French Public Prosecutor for a fraud investigation. Incompetence can only go so far before it becomes criminal.

If there are any other Xerox users who feel they may have suffered from similar circumstances, we will be more than happy to hear from them at info@homebusiness.org. uk to pass their statements onto the French authorities if they so wish.

Apart from the forums, we will also be circulating our file to the consumer bodies both in France and the UK, where Xerox maintenance contracts are administered and who are aware of their default in this matter.

I could conclude by saying good luck to all but that shouldn't have to play a part. We have subsequently found HP and Ricoh to be everything that Xerox isn't.