EBME Forums Forums Free discussion Free discussion VERY poor support

Is it just our hospital or does anyone else suffer from a rather poor customer/technical support from GE?

Not sure on this one, when you get past a certain point the support from their engineers and customer service is excellent.

I just get a feeling that they've populated a department somewhere at GE with Douglas Adam's Vogon's! They don't seem to talk between departments and hold things up for the smallest of problems that other companies would get on the phone and immediately sort out.

Yet another example of "Big Company Syndrome", surely?

Drone number 1,482 working in such-and-such a Division of a company intent on conquering the world, or one with a monopoly (or near monopoly) in certain areas, doesn't have to worry too much about job security, does s/he?

Such people probably spend most of their day attending to their own "social networking", I should imagine.

But as regards Quality of Service ... it can also depend upon who you are (the customer, that is). If you are in a large hospital, especially one about to sign a nice juicy purchase order for a load of capital equipment, then you may be sure of prompt action ... but if you are a small independent service provider, prepare to spend a lot of time listening to "music" (that is, being left on "hold").

For anyone read everyone and the answer is Yes

Are you reading this and taking note GE?

Robert

Yup, us too.

Individuals are competent and helpful; but the organisation is frustrating to deal with.

I'm sure Chris is right - Vogons are responsible. It's only a matter of time before they replace the 'on hold' music with a recital of Vogon poetry. Aaaaaaaaaaargh!

It would appear that we are in a minority here. Never had any major problems with tech support from GE. Far better than a few of the other major players I could mention. Perhaps it's a regional thing. I notice the negative comments come from the NW, East Midlands and the 'Smoke'.

Here in Bristol we experience a very variable technical support from GE & we also have real problems with their order processing of spare parts - lost orders. On the very few occasions we've had to use their field engineers they have been good but we've had to bang desks to get their administration to respond. Our consistent main problem is their turnaround time for repairs to patient monitoring devices & failure rate of some of their modules - S5 multi parameter & AGM (e-prestn e-caiov) - anyone else have a high failure rate on these devices?

Hi All
Yep same problems down here in Sunny Guernsey.
Techs. Amazing. Even their own Admin get fed up of dealing with them selves.
Certain Reps again brilliant, but you just feel so bad unloading on the good ones to deal with all the admin issues.
Repair of equipment. admin problems deserves a section on the forum all by it’s self.
Parts admin. mention GE and our parts manager chases you out of the office speaking in tongues with the odd coherent words like “they’ll get theirs”
Don’t order an out of date part or you will fall into a GE black hole and won’t be able to fly out of it even with an improbability drive (Sorry bit geeky Hitch Hikers stuff and all that)
EPSM “known issues” cause the bulk of our problems not much else and we are pretty much fully loaded with GE stuff. We do repair the bulk in house though.
Prices are a bit out of this world. We regularly hold up a part and say how much to all the engineering staff and they all ways ask if it’s a GE part before guessing.

A little story:
Wanted a GE part called them and they gave us the part number.
Ordered the part.
Part arrives but it is wrong.
Called up. Them: "But that is the part you ordered" Us "But you gave us the part number" and so on for several cycles.
Parts department not interested as they were right and it was the technical department who made the mistake.

Joined up thinking.
Robert

And the moral of these stories is ...