NI poor shipping and poor customer service

[santo_13]

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@Damill wrote:

Yes,

We have same experience. They seem to shut down hardware business. We have ordered a CDAQ9189 in April 2022.Not yet shipped. Now estimated end of March 2023. One year!. On one of their standard product. We are really sad about this. It used to be a company with technicians for technicians. Great product and support in the past. Now everything seem to be

• gone. 

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Not sure if you have been in the semiconductor or electronics industry and tried to source parts recently, the order backlog is quite prevalent across the electronics chips markets across all leading manufacturers. Given NI is dependent on these chips, any delays in getting these chips directly translate into delays to NI's customers.

[Damill]

Yes,

In fact we order electronic components as well as industrial automation stuff so we know about that. Here in Europe, also companies like Siemens have problem that gives up to 160 work days delay as an extreme for us. But we have most European suppliers running with slight extended shipping time, lets say 2-3 months. And we can buy industrial computers from shelf both from Europe and from Asia. And we can all find consumer electronics in local stores. Why do NI suffer more than others? How much income at NI comes from hardware vs. software? If hardware is a substantial part of the turnover it should affect economy but I can not find that it is visible on  presented income/turnover numbers on the stock market. The other scenario is that NI actually produce and deliver hardware at nearly 100% production rate but it all goes to highly prioritised volume customers and we others are put on hold. 

[Lumie12]

The lack of response is horrible. No one reaches out after you email them. Very hard to get in touch. WFH isn't feasible as no one is doing their job it seems. 

[User911]

Yes, their service is very poor and upper management don't seem to know and/or care. I am ready to purchase and already have a PO (for large $ amount) for them but no one from orders@ni.com is responding to my emails. As if they don't want my business. And there is no other way to escalate the matter. I wish there was a way to escalate to CEO. 

[Ni937200]

Having the same horrendous experience with NI.  I think they are a ghost company now that doesn't actually have any equipment they are trying to sell.

[Ni937200]

Same issue with me.  They are a ghost company.

[Damill]

Sorry to hear/read !!!

Where has all the technical knowledge gone? The soul of NI. I can remember 15 years ago when we as NI-partners could get professional technican-help directly from "Nth" floor in Austin HQ. From people that knew exactly why A/D conversion time must be set manually with property nodes in SCXI chassi when certain modules was mixed. 

The information I have got from different sources now is that the business-minded NI board is eager to increase market volume and can not see how NI can grow by giving costly support to old experienced users and even to handle sell and distribution issues. Instead, they want to reduce their own organization and let 3rd party resellers do the time consuming volume work of selling and give support for simple standard hardware. That is supposed to give new market segments of users not so previous familiar with NI products or having so high demands. The contradiction is that the strategy seems to be accompanied by a dramatic increase in prices while the world trend regarding cost of electronics has been static for many years although performance increase. This is true both for consumer electronics and professional/industrial products. NI is not strong enough to set their own agenda. They can not go for larger volumes of simplier products and in the same time force  prices up, This will inevitably force NI into less market share in a segment where competitors are many and the price competition is tuff.

My opinion is that they should instead have focused on keeping quality and support up of a reduced set of premium products to decent prices and tried to grow by extend/add selling of "turn-key solution boxes/packages" for simplier users (read dummies) with software+hardware for common applications in different areas. The software should be delivered with source code so users can modify or continue the packages if they want. By doing so you also reach one-time users that are not interested in learning instrumentation basics ut are willing to pay for easyness. And also experinced users that want to pay for reducing development time by using partly prewritten code.  

It is really, really sad to see how a great American technology company is going so wrong in business strategy. Let us all turn towards the CEO+board and sing the lyrics from Pink Floyd/The wall: "Hello, is there anybody out there ? "  

[YannisS]

I got to this page out of shared frustrations. For the past 3 years the customer service level plumeted. I had 1* out of 10* quality service from their side on both software and hardware. This is after 10* just before Covid. I have never seen a company failing so suden, particulalry giving the values they had before. 

My latest issue is that I have 2 cRIO-9053 CompactRIO Controller, brand new, that they will not take back. We ended up with them as we had to change the design becasue of their delays. and we missed the return short window (penalised) because of uncertainty of the design phase. While they are not of to large value the principle is broken in twofold. SO if thre is anyone out there please get in touch.

So, I would like to understnad this from NI:

1. What customer service and values are you promoting?

If level 0 or 1 is what we should expect, then we will deal with it. I just want to fully understand. 

2. If the qualtity of services has dropped so much and so fast, are we to expect the quality of the hardware to follow? 

At the moment I didn't notice that and I would hate to experience it.