ST Support Expectations

General Discussion
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Fair ‘nuff. There have been changes to the entire dev/engineering team structure recently contributing to some of these delays. You’re feeling the short-term downside, and for that I’m sorry. The upside is we’ve now laid a solid foundation to grow upon, and we’re hiring proper teams to provide support in areas that aren’t getting enough attention. If you take a look at our jobs page, you’ll see dev and community are definitely not being neglected—I count five open positions in that area.

Regarding timeline for Netatmo, I can tell you the devices team has confirmed they’re going to be testing again by end of week. That could mean changes are coming this week, but if they run into trouble it could also still be several weeks off. @tyler is aware of the thread, will update as soon as he has something meaningful to report.

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This honestly made my day! Thank you for the update and I’ll standby and cross my fingers QA goes well. If it doesn’t it would be amazing if @tyler could just let us know so we know what’s going on!

As far as the Jobs - I keep trying to get Kathe to convince you guys to hire an East Coast employee but I guess that’s just a pipe dream :smile:

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23

Get in line, @craig! :slight_smile:

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Hey you guys had your chance! Also Kathe is no longer running our recruiting (more of an FYI). We could probably hire an East Coast Developer Advocate but wasn’t it you @craig who started this thread? Hmmm… :wink:

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@craig @brianlees, I’m moving to Palo Alto for ST :slight_smile: . You should too!

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Gosh! What are they paying you? That’s one darn expensive place to live! :money_with_wings:

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Haha, the wonderful invention of public transportation, or personal vehicles.

The cost of living in the bay area isn’t ideal, but it’s a wonderful place to be.

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They have to pay extra to experience the big earthquakes. :wink:

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Don’t worry I had my chance. I think when I asked about being acquired during their interview and making a point of saying I didn’t want to quit my job for Smartthings and find out I worked for Apple, Google, or Facebook next week a few weeks before Samsung acquired them may have sealed my fate!

Wouldn’t this be the point of the thread? Seems like you need / would want people who are passionate about STs and desire to make it better. I know you aren’t satisfied with the status quo and don’t want to hire “Yes” men (women)! You guys want the people that are constantly pushing for a better experience (which is the true message behind this thread).

HAHAHAH - I’m sure my wife would just love that! I love STs and it would be an awesome place but I don’t think I’d change my whole way of life for it :smile: [More than I already have / continue to do as I add devices nearly weekly!]

I think I answered incorrectly to this response. Referring back to my original post I believe the correct response is:

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What HE said…! :+1: :wink:

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31

If passion was the criteria for a job at ST, I would have been the CTO. :wink:

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I didn’t say that was the only requirement! Jeff Hagins might have something to say about you trying to steal his job!

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33

How long does a typical response from ST support? It’s been over 5 days since I submitted a ticket with no response. I’ve tried replying to the email with the hopes that it would bump my request, no luck. Do tickets get lost sometimes? For the most part my ST experience has been great, but I need to know if there is an internal issue preventing my lock from communicating with ST or if my lock is junk and I need to fork out the cash for a new one.

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@april ? Any thoughts?

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I contacted kwikset support and it looks like they are sending me a new lock. We’ll see how it goes from there.

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Recently @Enitech , I’ll get an initial reply fairly quickly, but anything that requires a “level 2” or above response seems to be basically blackholed.

“I’ve contacted my supervisor to see if he is aware of this bug and if there is a fix - we may need to get a developer involved.”… Crickets. And like you mentioned, follow up emails will get ignored entirely.

Since I try to respect the time of the support team and research and my issues here and spend considerable time attempting to resolve them myself, pretty much any ticket I open is going to require more than level 1 support, and pretty much all of them have been not responded to in a satisfactory manor.

In one instance the issue was eventually fixed by a platform update, but no follow up communication by support. I simply randomly tried the same action that was failing and it spontainousely worked. I will still kind enough to close the ticket.

In another instance, I resolved the issue myself, but from the initial opening of the ticket had basically heard nothing.

Currently I’m dealing with an issue with a device added via the “replace device” feature. The device works perfectly when called by smartapps, but does not show as a thing tile. It is shown in the hub as ‘removed,’ but works perfectly, report status, responds. The first support engineer to respond, seemed to get that this was odd, and said he would look into it. Crickets, then a followup email from another support engineer who clearly didn’t really comprehend the ticket and claimed that it must have been manually excluded from the z-wave network (can’t if it is responding to commands from smartapps), and that the only solution is to remove all the apps that call it. Since it isn’t shown as a thing, it can’t be removed from apps individually, the whole app would have to be removed, basically destroying 90% of my build in the process.

No, we aren’t paying for 8x5xNBD support, but if ST ever hopes to have a model where people will consider paying for that level of support, or have that level of confidence in the platform, they best get started now.

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37

In another thread I mentioned that I had experienced ST Tech Support not following up with Customers, particularly when the problem was redirected to the Community for assistance.

@April was concerned and insisted that follow-up is the standard we should expect, especially since the Tech Support team is growing with excellent folks.

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I submitted a ticket about issue with Quirky Connect for Power Genius, they replied that they will look into it. I followed up 3 weeks later and they replied that they took it out of support.

My issue was not resolved, neither did they follow up on it.

Just sharing my recent experience.

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40

My two recent experiences have been excuses around everyone is busy with v2 hub development and we can’t pull someone off it to fix a bug with existing customers…

It was the exact same copied and pasted verbiage so I assume many support tickets get answered this way.

I want hub v2 out just as much as the next guy, but I paid for a hub v1 and have the expectation that it work and not require me to buy additional hardware to fix existing problems.

I want this to succeed but nothing is happening quickly and everything is getting pushed backwards. Really frustrating as an end user and developer.

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