@craig - Tyler from support here (not to be confused with community hero @tyler). Hate to see posts like this, but appreciate you laying it out and asking for our POV. Here are my thoughts:
tl;dr - We hear you, and I think we’re already taking some steps to alleviate your pain. I/we take this type of feedback to heart, and promise it’s not falling on deaf ears.
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I had a meeting yesterday with several founders and members of the executive team, and the meeting was focused on how we do a better job triaging more complex issues and setting expectations for response and resolution time. Everyone agrees we can (and will) do better in this area. Like you said, the answer sometimes might be “this isn’t on the development backlog for the next two months” but I’d rather tell you that up front rather than delivering the same message two weeks later. Also, it was a 7:30AM meeting. Ask my colleagues: I don’t do 7:30AM meetings :).
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Tactically, we’re deploying some new tools in the next few weeks that will make it easier for support to see when the root cause of an issue/bug has been fixed by the dev/product team. This should improve how we follow up on tickets like you’ve outlined. Honestly, those tools are more geared towards trending bugs/issues than things that are impact individual users (e.g. problem with a custom SmartApp code).
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All time support customer satisfaction is 98%. The last 60 days satisfaction is 98%. These metrics don’t always tell the full story, and passionate, power-user feedback like yours can be a leading indicator that things are trending the wrong way. Rest assured every member of support has been sent this post and is taking it to heart, present company included. That said, I’m really proud of the level of support we provide and stand by it 100%. Feedback like this is important to make sure we are continually improving.
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For more advanced questions like many of yours, the answer is usually crowdsourced amongst the entire support team, pulling in other groups when we get in over our heads. The team is constantly seeking out answers. Ask anyone in the SmartThings org and I’m confident they’ll tell you support is among the most passionate and vocal. Simply put, there’s not a lack of caring on the team—that I promise you.
Fun fact: looking at our company’s internal chat client, the support team chat room is the most active, with over 80,000 chats since we adopted it less than a year ago. Take out .gifs, and there’s still at least 50,000 messages in there.
While I know your summary in this thread isn’t a direct quote, it sounds like we can be doing a better job with the delivery of the message and follow-up when we don’t have a straightaway answer. For what it’s worth, any ticket where we write “we don’t know” is accompanied by sighs and sad faces on our end. I promise we do care.
Thanks again for the candid feedback—we’ll put it to good use.