No they don’t. Or at least, if Wyze is properly supporting them it doesn’t have to be a hard job. Wyze is failing here and it continues to make me reluctant to recommend Wyze or purchase anything else from them.
I’ve had to do this sort of job. Customer support starts during the design phase, it means including feedback from your customer support team who is going to have to field questions. It continues through the testing and pre-release. Get them involved early. It doesn’t need to be extensive but often customer support can give great “common mistakes” feedback.
More importantly, if customer support is dropping things into a blackhole and the engineering team has no desire, concern or impetus for actually fully and completely addressing the complaints, concerns and problems encountered by customers then there is a serious breakdown.
I’m waiting for a small but critical bug to be (a) acknowledged and then (b) fixed in the app (with possible firmware implications but it seems unlikely). It’s been months and customer support was explicit that their customer support tracking system is not integrated with bug tracking and development. Fine… that takes time but that doesn’t negate the importance of communication.
If customer support at Wyze is a hard job it’s because Wyze is making it hard.
Is that because the executive team doesn’t value customer support? Is it because they are overwhelmed by the increased number of products? Is it because the customer support team isn’t empowered to report issues and have them addressed? Is it because engineering has been directed to ignore any issue that doesn’t impact a high revenue product?
I don’t know but it all comes down to a bottom line that it really looks like Wyze doesn’t have a good plan on sustainable growth. If you can’t support your product line by addressing quality issues you enter a spiral of doom where the quality continues to drop and that negatively impacts the brand and so less products get sold which means less issues can be addressed and fewer products can come to market.
That is hard but to say providing good customer service is hard is just crazy. We know how to do it, spend the money to do it right and empower the leadership of that effort to be responsive.
This isn’t just a ‘customer service issue’ it calls into question their entire business plan or their ability to execute well on that plan. We already know they can’t sustain “cheap forever” as the cost of cameras has gone up so they are going to have to compete on quality eventually and it looks like they are only giving lip service to that reality.
And on the off chance anyone from Wyze reads this I’ll say what I think the experience should be like: Tell me whether I’ve found a bug or it’s working as designed with no intention to fix within 2 weeks. Engineers too busy? Change your priorities – you are sacrificing your quality and, more importantly, your reputation by failing to finish the job.
Wish list items and new products are flashy but extreme frustration comes from not fixing something that’s broken.
I want Wyze to succeed. I just worry that they are pulling a classic ‘expanding too fast to maintain quality’ move that will bite us all in the butt.
Wow. Sorry, probably could have said that more concisely but /rantover.