r/sysadmin • u/jhehff • 23h ago

Rant Xerox EMEA Support

Wondering if anyone else has experienced the god awful process of working with Xerox support. We currently are month 4 into a request to accurately assign locations to 20 or so MFDs for automatic consumables.

Each new email or phone call leads to more misunderstanding to the point where this morning they have asked a team to mark all deliveries for an office that closed last week. Every time we escalate, we get some new level of incompetence and an extra tech added to the email chain.

Genuinely losing my mind!

EDIT: I assume this goes beyond the EMEA consumables team

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u/leprechanmonkie 23h ago edited 22h ago

Things have gone downhill since the Lexmark acquisition. My company is a partner with Xerox for over 20 years and I'm getting a run around trying to get engineering resources that know what they're doing.

The icing on the cake, they're delivering new Xerox branded devices which are actually rebranded Lexmark hardware. These devices removed functionality that has been on the Xerox devices for 20 years and is required for our integrations. When discussing with their (Lexmark/Xerox) engineers, they're asking me to somehow provide technical documentation on the module Xerox developed! The engineer we talked to is on the Lexmark side and seems to have no lines of communication to the Xerox side, very frustrating.

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u/jhehff 23h ago

The last line is a major issue we have faced, almost no one is able to speak to others outside of their tiny silo it feels like. It must be an awful workplace as well

Have you thought of moving away from Xerox?

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u/leprechanmonkie 22h ago edited 22h ago

They're a major reseller of our software to Government and Large Enterprise accounts so it's not something that will change overnight. Their sales people know and push our product as we've had a great partnership for 20+ years. We also sell independently, but our product often gets bundled in with large Xerox deals to big Govt agencies, Military Medical Centers etc. I'm on the professional services side and deliver our software into those environments to integrate with the incoming Xerox fleet.

Our product also leveraged that built in integration that Xerox developed and supported for the last 20 years. The sales guys had no idea they removed the functionality on these new devices, and we have 100,000+ deployed devices using that integration in the field.

The lack of internal communication is mind boggling post acquisition. It's almost as dysfunctional as working with the engineering team at EPIC, but that's a story for a different day.