ST basics broken again?! Or is it "Still"?

For months, I’ve used a “Good Morning” routine to fire off lights at 6am MTWRF. Single most stock and simple thing SmartThings could do. No SmartApp, no fancy code, just the stock routine with a few checkboxes and a time/date configuration. It was working until relatively recently.

And for a little while now, it hasn’t. No logged event, no notification, nothing.

And no obvious way to contact support; no bug form on the web page, for example. (BTW, that would be the same support team that, after leaving my LANNouncer publication request unopened for six months, SILENTLY DELETED IT within the last month, so let’s not hear how responsive they are. If you can’t be honest, don’t say anything.)

Oh no! A missed event is certainly frustrating, and not having an obvious way to contact support makes things even much so. I know the developer community team mention there’s a backlog of community submitted work. I believe they mention those in the developer calls, but it’s not widely known. Understandably, that could be super frustrating.

The same support team is the only way for us to see why your routine didn’t fire. There’s two ways you can contact support: https://support.smartthings.com/ (scroll down to “get in touch” section): with an email, or you can hop on with an agent to do a live chat from 9AM-5PM PST.

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seems like there is an issue - have been troubleshooting for over 2 hrs now -packet capture shows plenty of reset packages when trying to connect to the platform from the hub … tells the story …

@April So I filed via the web site, with my ST-registered email. And I am not making this next bit up…

“Jason” replied to that email address saying, and again, I’m not making this up:

“? What is your email account associated with SmartThings? Get back to me when you can and we will get to the bottom of this.”

Seriously? All he had to do was actually try the address I put in the form!

So, is there a way to reach real support people, who are more interested in providing support than in avoiding it?

It’s definitely frustrating. When you write back to support you also have to specifically give them permission to look at your account.

So now when I send in a support request I start at the top with “this is the email address associated with my smartthings account. You have my permission to look at my account in order to provide support on this question.” That can save two more back-and-forth exchanges just to get started.

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It seems counter-intuitive, I get it. But for privacy reasons, they can’t assume without your permission to look.

You may be a smart one to provide your ST email from the get go… but as what @JDRoberts mentioned, you’ll be surprised how often that’s not the case with emails sent in vs what account they’re using.

Bare with them; trust me- they want to actually help you. I’m more than ever impressed by the level of tech support (yes, not every response is ever ideal 100% every single time collectively ever…), but I’ve seen them go above and beyond for people often or not, and admittedly, some are way too “overqualified” for the position, but do it because this is their passion.

“Overqualified” in quotes, because I seen one of my closest friends who is a Big Data Engineer and a Masters in AI, (@karl - previously support) do a lot of these tickets, and was one of the original support team here in Palo Alto. I’m not kidding when support really does this out of their hearts. They do want to care to ensure your HA works. We all do.

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May I suggest that the Zendesk auto response include asking the Customer for this information & permission with a web link so the Customer can choose to immediately add it to the ticket?

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@April / @tgauchat

may I suggest reading the ST privacy policy first? https://www.smartthings.com/privacy dont see the need for any acknowledgment based on what I read … ok I am not a lawyer but it seems the policy covers even more than what you request during a support case …

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Holy cow! What century do you guys live in? Why can’t you just create a simple web form for submitting support requests that lets the customer input their e-mail address and authorize account access in a single step?

And since you’re so mobile-centric, this should actually be built-in into the mobile app.

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Apparently SmartThings doesn’t believe in… wait for it… automation?

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The shoemaker’s children always go barefoot. :wink:

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As well as prompting the user for necessary info that would otherwise result in a lot of back an forth.

http://supercard.us/BUG/

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It’s not clear to me why ST support won’t look at problems, but also not so clear as to how inscrutable the system is that even when they do, they can’t figure it out. I reset the Routine Tuesday night, it ran Wednesday, and then did not run today or even log an attempt.

@April I did email “support” (Jason) back with this detail, but it may make sense to get an engineer who can try to discern what’s going on involved. Surely your back end logs should cover triggers.

I also am having trouble with routines failure. Particularly the ones trigged by sunrise/sunset. I even set multiple redundancy by having routines, smartapp called sunrise/sunset, and smartrules app to switch modes based on sun position but it still it fails too often.

It is quite frustrating after 2 years of usage ST still feels like a beta platform at best. A home automation that constantly requires my attention and babysitting.

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@April So it didn’t fire yesterday. Jason also didn’t reply to my response to him yesterday. Any chance you can get someone from support to watch it real-time in 30 minutes?

I didn’t get my system that long ago and I think I’m just going to return it all. All was well until several days ago, probably the day of the hub update, and now none of my routines ever run. I get zero notifications unless I open the app, at which point I get everything all at once. That includes Smart Home Monitor, so if I actually intended to use it as security I’d never know what happened until I opened the app. My lights associated with a contact sensor no longer work. No presence. The only thing that actually still works are my lights connected to a motion detector.

Could also be the latest version of the Android app but whatever, either way something broke it entirely when it was fine before. I sure didn’t change anything on my end.