Support, logs, and venting about a vaporware process

Watercooler
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I received an update on a ticket with Wyze Support after I submitted a log for a known issue. The update didn’t provide me with any meaningful information, so I felt like venting:

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I’d like to respond directly to a couple of things you wrote:

On Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 8:52 AM Support <support@wyze.com> wrote:

Let’s sort things out. We’ve reached out to the team and thanks to reports from users like you, our developers are aware of and actively investigating this issue.

I’m aware that the issue is already being investigated. I already stated this twice previously when I said that I was submitting the log as advised by a Wyze employee in the Wyze Forum.

App logs are sent directly to our engineering team to use toward improving future app and firmware releases. These logs cannot be accessed or followed by our support team. We’re working on developing a process so that we can track these logs but it’s still very much in progress.

I have real difficulty believing that last statement. In a ticket from an unrelated issue dating from August 2021, another Wyze Wizard wrote this: “My team here in support does not review your log or follow its progress. We’re working on developing a process so that we can track these logs on our end, but it’s still very much in progress. We hope to have the ability to receive more details from your log submissions soon.”

It’s been over two years, and you’re still working on that process? Seriously?! I’d like to make a couple of points here:

  1. As a user, I don’t actually expect customer-facing support personnel to have access to technical logs. Those things seem like they would be the domain of developers and engineers who have the ability to track problems, remediate errors on the back end, and prepare updates for release back to the users.
  2. If support personnel can’t access and review the logs, then it seems completely unnecessary to mention this at all in a customer support ticket. It’s kind of like saying, “We know about this information, but we can’t really do anything about it.” That’s mildly infuriating.

And then you mention this “process” that’s “still very much in progress”…for well over two years.

In the meantime, we would like to humbly ask for your patience and understanding while the team investigates and works on this issue. Thank you for your understanding.

I actually do have patience for people who are providing meaningful and reliable information about a progress update while they’re working on a problem, and since this is a well-known issue that affects many customers, I don’t expect an immediate fix. That much I understand. What I don’t understand is the insistent messaging about a process that doesn’t seem necessary (and may not actually exist) and the seeming inability of support to read and respond to direct questions in ticket threads.

Thank you for being a part of Wyze!

You’re welcome, and thank you again for taking the time to respond. I’m aware that I’m likely venting to someone without much power to effect change, but I hope you’re able to pass this message further up the chain to someone with the ability to make a difference in the way Wyze Support communicates with customers. I’m frustrated precisely because I care, and I want Wyze to be a better company for its customers.

Regards,

I really don’t understand why they’re parroting this same message for so long without any apparent progress in the way Support handles customer issues. Wyze Support is broken, and it’s playing a broken record. That’s disappointing.

I realize that the guidance here in the Forum is predominantly user-to-user and that there are some issues that users can’t fix, but this avenue generally seems much more productive toward resolving issues, and I appreciate the other users who take the time to contribute here. Thank you all who pick up the slack.

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I agree that at this point they should remove verbiage from their responses about the ability to view logs being in progress. I don’t think that will happen because as you said, I don’t think the average support person would even understand the logs if they did have access, so there is no point. However, what I think they SHOULD do differently, is set up a process where the tier 2 support or engineers working on the logs or ticket that support deemed worthy of submission are required to leave notes about it somewhere, and Tier 1 support should have access to some notes or comments about updates related to the progress of that issue. It is frustrating to be told “we sent the issue to someone, but will never hear back anything about it…so just look for it to one day hopefully have an update” which is essentially the messaging that is currently given. I completely get how frustrating that is for anyone having an issue and this is one of the biggest reasons people criticize Wyze support. I think a better tracking system could go a long way to at least reassuring people that there could be some progress with their issues or at least that they weren’t just cast into a blackhole.

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The block quote in my original post is the message I sent back to Wyze Support via e-mail. I just wanted to make that clear, because I should’ve explicitly stated that earlier.

I agree with that in principle, but my sense in dealing with Tier 1 Support personnel is that they generally don’t give thoughtful responses anyway, so I wouldn’t expect them to read engineers’ notes and relay a summary back to a user in a meaningful way. When they don’t even bother to answer directed follow-up questions posed by a user in a ticket reply, that gives the impression that they don’t really read and internally process the tickets in detail or that they don’t have the freedom to exercise critical thought in their responses (or both). I don’t have any insight into Support’s training or processes, but the responses I’ve seen to my own tickets really don’t inspire much in the way of customer confidence.

As someone who’s provided support professionally in the past, that’s really frustrating to see.

Yeah, and unfortunately I think that criticism is largely justified. :frowning_face:

I agree. I don’t know if the fix involves process alteration/improvement, updating Support ticket response scripts, personnel training, or all of the above, but some kind of change should happen, because what’s in place now doesn’t seem to be working for a lot of customers.

As always, thank you for your thoughtful response.

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