It's ridiculous how some offices are stretched so thin and how some techs are constantly being sent out of their areas to help surrounding offices. The only thing keeping it from getting worse is that customers are leaving. Not a great either way.
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I was a Ricoh field service technician until just a couple months ago. I worked for them for 6 years. Some of the products are good especially the black and white copiers as they are more reliable and not so complicated to work on because they are a single process machines. Of course they're blaming Toner shortages on the supply chain issue, and customer support complaints are expected when a tech walks in the door for a service call. And as far as service goes and copier deliveries, they recently contracted out the delivery service to another company under contract and they have no direct connection to Ricoh except for delivery of their machines. They recently envoked a policy where untrained delivery drivers who have little IT experience are expected to set up and install the copiers etc. They have been short on service help in my area ever since the covid farce was released on the world, and they now expect technicians to drive ridiculous amounts of miles due to expanded territories and lack of adequate field technicians without any additional compensation for mileage. They alos live by metrics for field techs and with the expanded territories, it is virtyally imposissible to meet these metrics. With gas prices being on a daily roller coaster ride, they are only reviewing the gas reimbursements on a monthly basis in essence expecting the service techs to support them by paying high gas prices with little to no additional compensation. And they never privide training on new models and you just have to depend on yourself and poorly translated service and parts manuals for assistance for the most part to figure out a problem. When you do get a help desk technician on the phone, many times they are located in another country and deciphering the accents and pronunciations is a big problem. The mission quotation of "Imagine Change" is a big part of the issues they have as an international company with worldwide reach. When they exercise this imagine change concept, it creates issues in the field for service technicians simply because they change too many things from previous models that worked very well that needed no changes to start with. Now I'm not going to criticize them completely because in their favor I will have to say that their power supplies are very rugged and they last forever. In six years of working for this company I only found about three power supplies that actually failed and caused problems. In these days of modern electronics, many use cheap components components such as capacitors and they don't last the lifetime of the machine. If I had known when I was getting into when I accepted this job I definitely would not have taken it. Now they're finally realizing that they are in trouble as far as help goes especially when field service technicians are concerned and they recently sent me a couple trinkets to help me improve my attitude towards the company after almost six years of working for this company, they never acknowledged my commitment to my work until the techncian shortage started causing excessive service complaints, and due to the supply chain issues and lack of service techs, I could see my end coming of my employement coming to a rapid end. Glad to be gone in reality.
How do junior techs learn after you force the senior techs out. Of course On Th Job Training, (OJT). Only drawback, the Customer is down while junior learns. Not good for customers or Ricoh.
Maybe it’s time for an Employee Disengagement Survey?
TS212