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In October 2010 I decided to purchase a new multifunction printer, (I needed Wi-Fi) and being mindful of the increasing costs of printer cartridges was quite impressed by the claims of the Kodak ESP 9250 and duly purchased it. The claims they make are quite true, the ink cartridges are far cheaper than other branded makes. What they didn’t tell you is their product isn’t that good in the first place and their Customer Services don’t like dealing with customers.

After only a few weeks I started to run into problems with it. The tray used to print photographs kept jamming as it calibrated itself to the point where it became unusable. FAIL #1

Rather than take a hammer to it out of frustration we took it back to the retailer in December 2010 and asked for an exchange. This, Staples obliged with without much fuss.

On getting the new Kodak ESP 9250 home we had to go through the laborious set up routines and software loads again – why is that the same drivers were already installed on the two laptops from the previous printer? FAIL #2
So we had it set up. All connected to the house Wi-Fi network and both Laptops able to see it. As soon as we went to print, the same problem occurred; the not-needed photo paper tray jammed first time out of the box. FAIL #3

Once we finally got it to work it was fine until we didn’t need to use it for about 15 min, then it just lost Wi-Fi sync and we had to reboot the pcs. I know full well this is not a problem with the Laptops because they are able to connect to other Wi-Fi networked peripherals. FAIL #4

There is clearly a design fault with the printer (well IMHO at least) in respect to the photo-tray jamming all the time and no clear information available to rectify the Wi-Fi issue. Now whilst Staples were very good first time around I thought I’d see if I could find any information online on the Kodak website, but no, nothing helpful. I did send a message to their Customer Services team via a form on the website, but no response. FAIL #5

So being a big user of Twitter I thought I’d use a more direct approach and complained about the issues in a couple of 140 character tweets. I’d given them enough chance to respond hadn’t I? I won’t say that Kodak don’t have anyone listening to online buzz because they seemed to have someone doing it, but whilst Susan under the Twitter profile @KodakPrinters contacted me and asked for my email address, she failed to follow up or respond in anyway once I had sent my email address to her. I tweeted my frustration in the open and directly to her, again no response. FAIL #6

Now you may wonder if I was being rude or abusive and deserved to be ignored. But No I was not. I wasn’t happy and clearly stated how I felt about the level of customer services but I wasn’t and will not be abusive.

So I returned to the Customer Services pages on the Kodak website and sent yet another email to them, this time outlining my frustration not only with their printers, but also with being ignored by what they claim to be Customer Services. Hallelujah!! Finally a response from Ricky in Customer Services in Rochester, NY. Ricky asked me what the problem was then asked me to provide a list of information to him so that he could direct the complaint and problem in the right direction; all the time apologising for the inconvenience. In a further response from him I got a friendly and encouraging email telling me that he had personally passed the complaint and my information onto the UK team, which would be able to help me.

That was on 1st March 2011. Disappointingly I have still to hear from them. FAIL #7

It is clearly obvious to me that the Kodak Eastman company don’t really care about me as a customer, that their Customer Services people need to be retrained, starting with the use of email and phones. Kodak you should be ashamed. A brand once respected is failing to do the simple things.

I am stuck with the Kodak ESP 9250 printer for now. It’ll teach me to go for the cheap option; sadly it was not worth the money I paid for it, which wasn’t that much.

I doubt by venting in this blog will get a positive reaction but it helped get the frustration off my chest and if it saves others from making the same mistake, then great.