A Picture is Worth the Price of a Service Call
December 22, 2008
Mutoh America Inc., a manufacturer of wide format printers, announced that beginning January 1st, 2009, webcams will ship with each Mutoh printer. The company says the cameras will allow visual communication for Mutoh customers when working with their dealers to reduce idle time that can occur when diagnosing issues.

Webcams have certainly come down in price, and we doubt that adding one to the rather high-end printers Mutoh is known for will add more than a pittance to their manufacturing costs, but we're betting they get a lot of use. Not that Mutoh printers are prone to breaking down, which we're sure they're not, but these days there are many machines being run by folks who simply aren't well versied in either graphic arts or machine maintenance. And even the best of machines won't perform well if they are operating under the wrong settings.

Mutoh hinted at this in their press release. “Often times, maintenance, workflow, RIP, and application settings create undesirable output that visual communication can detect and resolve – reducing customer down time” said Mutoh’s Customer Service Manager, Mike Bisson.

That's a nice way of saying "we can't help it if you don't know how to follow directions." They didn't say that: I did.

It is a growing concern for developers of hardware and software. The customer base seems to be getting less and less procifient at basic language skills. Most of us don't like to read manuals in the first place, but it seems as though some of our new machine operators may not have the skills to do so in the first place. That may be something to talk to teachers and school funding agencies about, but print service providers have to work in the real world. In the real world, employee capabilities are lacking.

So it would seem the webcams should be a good idea. Tech support technicians can have a look for themselves at how things are set up, and it's certainly cheaper to install a webcam than create and implement and update diagnostic software which may not tell you what you need to know anyway.

With the web cam you can have the operator point to the outlet to see if the thing is plugged in.

Problem solved.

Posted by Stephen Beals on December 22, 2008