Statement regarding current delays in some shipments and customer support replies - TUXEDO Computers

First of all, we want to expressly thank our many customers who are showing us a lot of understanding for the current situation and their patience!

We really appreciate that very much!

What is it all about?

We are very happy about the great interest in our Linux products, but we also don't want to hide the fact that the enormously increased number of orders in the course of "Lockdown" and "Home office" and the even doubled amount of customer inquiries are a great challenge to cope with.

Well, as every reader may know, COVID-19 has been causing many challenges for all kinds of industries and companies.

First, there are the actual cases of infection. Apart from the fact that you do not wish anyone this disease, this case can occur at any time in any company of a supply chain and therefore unexpectedly slow down or even temporarily halt production through quarantine measures.

But even apart from the actual infections, the "Lockdowns" and especially the extraordinary increase of people working in "home office" have caused an extremely strong increase in demand for computer hardware.

This is causing major delivery shortages for components such as graphics cards (currently made even worse by the cryptoming boom), but also e.g., for AMD's popular Ryzen 5000 CPUs.

Speaking of them, we do not yet have any concrete information as to when our ODMs will be supplied with a wide range of new Ryzen 5000 APUs in order to then start production of the barebone devices.

Why delayed responses from our customer support are not always avoidable

For the aforementioned reasons, the amount of customer inquiries has also increased extremely!

Our customer support team currently gets many hundreds calls and emails every day, which have to be processed in order of receipt. Of course many of them can be finished quickly, others (especially technical inquiries) are sometimes far more time-consuming to answer.

Just to give you a rough idea of the numbers we're talking about here, we've outlined the inquiry volume below as an example:

• 16.02.2019-18.02.2019: 374
• 16.02.2020-18.02.2020: 703
• 16.02.2021-18.02.2021: 1682

As you can see, the ticket volume has roughly doubled each year over the same period, and even more than quadrupled from 2019 to 2021!

Via reddit or Twitter, we want to offer additional platforms for our customers to get in contact with us, but even there waiting times can't always be avoided.

We are very happy and thankful, that so many customers are interested in our Linux computers, put their trust in our company and are willing to support us, but this huge amount of customer inquiries is a heavy challenge we have to deal with in the current situation. But we do! :-)

So we totally understand, that customers are disappointed or maybe even somewhat angry, when waiting for an reply for several days in some cases, but we are working hard to gradually improve that situation!

Sustainable personnel decisions without "hire and fire" philosophy

Despite all staff increases, we try to make sustainable personnel decisions:

In addition to the quality-conscious screening of applicants, it was not foreseeable, especially in the early days of COVID-19 and even today, how long "Lockdowns" and "Home office" would last and whether, after the pandemic, our business would merely return to normal or even slow down due to a possible saturation of demand.

For this reason, it would not only have been impossible in terms of existing space capacities and work structures, but also unsustainable to hire large numbers of staff with little quality control, who might have to be fired again after a few months when the order situation have normalized or even slowed down.

How we continuously improve this situation

During the last months we have increased our support team's staff and also hired new people in departments like development and back-office.

Please note that new employees have to get used to workflows, programs, and technologies and the bunch of necessary information all around.

In addition to that, we are working on providing more granular and frequent order status information via email as well as on more documentary and guides, which shall provide better help for customers with software/Linux related issues.

So we gradually improve that situation, but we nevertheless still have to ask our customers for patience and understanding for that extraordinary situation and the challenges we have to deal with.

But we highly appreciate that most of our customers do so anyway!