Efforts we can make to try to get better Support

I’ve been on this forum a few months and noticed a lot of posts from people complaining about Wyze Support. My experience with Wyze Support hasn’t been all good, but having worked as Software Support for 10+ years, I’d like to share some universal things that may help.

  1. Try chat or email if possible
    Not all Support people you interact with are the same. More senior/knowledgeable Support tend to be second or third line Support. Nobody likes to be on the phone, so if there’s a choice, more senior Support people most likely wouldn’t be the person on phone duty.

  2. Keep it Simple Stupid
    Most people take only a few seconds to read, much more so a Support person on a time crunch. Try to describe everything succinctly, with timeline and relevant screenshots.
    Just as we customers often complain how customer service gives us canned responses, Support people also can tell when a customer is making effort to communicate clearly. “My camera doesn’t work” gives clear indicator that you’re venting, and Support will give you time to vent, instead of actually helping you with the issue.

  3. Try not to vent
    It’s no fun listening to problems all day, especially when it’s not your fault. Try not to take it out on Support, as they’re the ones who might know some tips/workarounds that can help you.

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These are all very great and very true pieces of advice. Thanks for sharing!

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4. Be patient as they get through any required scripting.
This is about Cusotomer service in general, not just Wyze…I’ve worked customer service and Tech Support for at least 4 companies (while in college). Let me give advice here: Most Customer Service or technical support staff for any company has certain parameters they are required to accomplish. They will like probably ask you to try some things you have already attempted, or possibly even said you tried, or may seem unrelated to what you’ve described. This is normal. They’re not being incompetent idiots, or ignoring you, or being jerks. Try to understand that they are probably required to confirm they tried all the basic troubleshooting first. Part of the reason for this is that the majority of the time these things actually solve the majority of the issues, so they will get in trouble for potentially being negligent if they skip them. You may be competent and already know things or tried basic things, but it’s hard to guess who did something competently/correctly vs who thought they did but did not, etc. There are people who think they did something right, but left out a step or did it in the wrong order. They have no way of knowing half the relevant variables that might be different for you vs someone else and they’ve seen untold numbers of cases of someone saying they already tried something, made them do it again and it magically works when they finally do it with them. Just be patient and do it AGAIN and get through it. Once you get through then they can back you up as an advocate for you that those things didn’t work. Now they will be allowed to seek more advanced options including tier 2 support help, etc. If you refuse to do the basic stuff, they may be forbidden to escalate your situation any further for any other more advanced help because it’s possible the basic scripting that fixes the majority of the issues would have resolved your issue too and you are not cooperating to pass the basic filters. I know it can be annoying, especially if it seems obvious, but just take a breath, understand it’s Standard Procedure and the agent is just following the requirements to ensure they are ruling out the most common things first. Then they can leverage the most advanced options after that.
5. Post your support ticket number and explanation here if your issue isn’t handled properly.
If you are sure support screwed up, post a comment to us with your support ticket number and explain what you think the agent did incorrectly. We forum volunteers may be able to bring that to the attention of someone with Wyze to review if support actually gave improper information or help. It happens (Again, this happens with support from basically all companies…their agents are people and they screw up or are ignorant of something, or maybe new or who knows what. If your situation is not handled right, we can usually get that resolved). --But keep in mind, this is if they actually did something WRONG, not just because they decided something differently from what the user wanted. For example…if someone did something that voids the warranty (or the warranty expired already) and Wyze won’t replace it because it doesn’t qualify for a warranty replacement, we can’t escalate a person’s situation to get them a replacement anyway when the rep did the right thing in that case. Them not doing what you wanted is not always the same thing as them doing the wrong thing.

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You worked 4 different jobs while in college? :open_mouth:

Good points @carverofchoice!
Honestly on #5, I never heard of this practice until Wyze. But good for Wyze for all the volunteer Mavens!

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Not all at the same time! :joy: One at a time. :slight_smile: I rotated through the following:
Sprint PCS (now merged with TMobile); DirecTV; Comcast; Qwest (now CenturyLink).

Yes, it is a great safety net. I like that Wyze wants to know when their support made a mistake so they can fix it and provide coaching to the employee who made the mistake, or fix their policy or flow or news to their agents to ensure things go better after that. At least Wyze makes good effort. I don’t necessarily expect perfection, but reasonable resolutions should happen. We volunteers keep an eye out for anything that seems messed up and try to get those passed on for someone to look into when we find them. :slight_smile: Some of that may happen behind the scenes, but I assure you I’ve seen a lot of such great resolutions when we find things that just don’t seem right. :wink:

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And to think, all I did in college was sit in a computer lab telling people “Sorry, your term paper is toast. Reboot your Mac.”

Honestly I do wish Wyze would empower their Support a bit more, like giving them access to logs, etc. It’s a pain having to repeat myself when I contact Support.

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As I recall, this was something they were working on. I don’t know how long it will take though. I know even the community managers would love to gain access to logs too.

I think one of the reasons they haven’t prioritized this is that the logs wouldn’t really do them any good anyway. Most of what is sent in the actual logs would be complete technobabble nonsense to 99% of them other than the short explanation written by the user of why the log was sent (rather than what is in the log itself). So, the logs are primarily just for the engineers to check out.

But, it could be helpful to allow support to read the note submitted along with the log. In addition, if support could look at past tickets associated with a log, they should be able to read any notes, etc that went along with it. Then allowing support agents to skip all scripting that was already done with a previous agent. Allowing those as a minimum would help A LOT so a person isn’t always starting from scratch every time they reach out to support. Yeah, I totally agree with that.

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I agree with how non-sensical log entries can be, but if Wyze can give Support a list of common key phrases/error messages to look for, they can potentially find the cause of an issue all on their own, and save Dev some time in investigation.

And as a customer, I would have more faith in a company whose Support can say, “yes I read the logs you submitted, and I noticed this error that shows the root cause is most likely this” vs “I’m guessing this is the issue but will have to wait for Dev to look into this since I can’t”.

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I agree with that in that situation.

Though I can see a rationale that letting untrained people misinterpret what they see in a log could potentially also cause harm from the misinterpretation. Many of the reps won’t be technologically savvy and I could see it cause frustration if a user gets one rep who can understand it, and then when the call back getting someone who doesn’t. I suspect that introducing increased risk of inconsistent experience like that could lead to increased frustration as well. If someone gets a rep capable of understanding the log, it could be exponentially helpful, but then if they get someone who doesn’t, or is confused by it, I could see potentially be a bad experience. The question is, is it worse to say “I don’t have access to it and someone else will respond to you when they’ve had time to review it” or “I have access, but I don’t really understand it” And everyone demanding to get a competent supervisor “since this person must just be an idiot with inadequate training that doesn’t know what they’re doing and is wasting my time.” That seems like something most companies would want to avoid (speaking from experience).

Perhaps a reasonable solution would be to update the log process and policy in a way in which the log receives a status update or short notes from an engineer in some way which can seen by the user in the app for any logs they have submitted. IDK, just thinking off the top of my head.

This is a wonderful discussion either way.

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I agree it can be dangerous to have an uninformed Support person making wrong conclusions and giving out misinformation to customers. Hopefully this access can be given to trained/more knowledgeable Support people only.

Also Wyze developers should be able to program their log entries to make them more verbose/informative so that common problems like WiFi connection error can be identified.

This is a tough sell unless Wyze trusts their developers to all know how to write with customers in mind. Comments like “this is possibly the same bug as X” would probably confuse customers even more.

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Take all the documentation currently available: tutorials, FAQs, [solved] community posts, support logs, etc… and dump it into an AI-powered knowledgebase. And, I mean the latest GPT4 AI. Then make that the first line of support. Record that initial conversation to be used as context (and hopefully a complete description of the issue) to be given to the live support person to take it from there – if necessary.

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Also, for those who decide to call into Support (or any call center), it is best to make sure your phone number is not restricted/blocked.

More sophisticated call centers have the ability to track your phone number to check to see if you’ve called more than once within the past hour. If so they would route you automatically to a more experienced person who can give you better help and offers.

I got hung up on twice when I called Best Buy about an installation and they ended up giving me a free install on my 3rd call without me saying anything about the previous calls. :+1:

Not sure if Wyze has this. If not, hopefully someone is reading this and will add it soon. Really helps to prevent Support cases from going nuclear.