Not looking for support, per se. Seem to be an extraordinary number of bugs/issues/complaints. Wyze seems to have a lack of interest in what is being posted here, ignoring the problems and complaints. Many, many posts with lots of requests from the Mods and Mavens asking for logs to send on to Wyze. They really need some way to actually track this stuff and support isn’t it. Many of the CS contacts barely know how to read the scripts they’ve been given for troubleshooting and rarely does a problem get escalated from there.
Mod Note: This post from Forum Feedback Thread split off to new topic since it doesn’t directly relate to operation of the forum.
I said it before, forums are not an efficient way to do bug reporting. There’s no way to control the information you receive. Bug reporting apps (web pages) capture required information for the devs to act on. It’s easy to review and sort out one-offs vs operator errors vs real issues. The public side is a list of reported issues such as “Plugs disconnect and blink - version .172 - Fix in progress,” etc. All bugs go through the bug reporting page. Forums also get into side chatter that make it difficult to sort out problems and may add trails that are not relevant to the issue.
The same is really true for the wishlist. Any suggestion needs a quick triage from the dev team: Is it a good idea? What is the level of difficulty? What else might be impacted? Once that review is completed, it can be another status page. A forum suffers from the same problems in a wishlist that it does in bug reporting. It’s difficult to manage. Also, software wishlists aren’t a democracy. An idea from a couple of users may be a great idea while an idea supported by hundreds may not be practical due to other considerations; or may require a lot of time due to system interactions. The triage status, along with a quick comment from the dev team, makes that clear. Often, the things that users think are easy can be complicated and vice-versa.
I think the forum mods are doing the best they can but the systems in place for such a large, varied, platform are neither fair to them, the users or the dev team.
This is primarily a user to user forum. While some bugs do get reported, this isn’t the function of the forum. The bug reporting function is in the app under submit a log. And many many times users in this forum are directed to contact support when simple troubleshooting help from other users don’t resolve the issue. There is also a discord server and a Facebook group, and those are also just user to user discussion, more so than an arm of support.
The problem with submitting a log is there is never any feedback from Wyze. Calling support is a joke since you only get front-line staff working off of scripts. If the scripts don’t work the typical answer is to send replacement hardware, which probably has the same issue as the current one. There also is no obvious way to get a problem escalated when the CS agent doesn’t know what to do, let alone wasting potentially hours on the phone only to receive inadequate responses.
I always submit a log, and when I speak to customer service/support I give them the pertinent log numbers and they escalate and I usually get a response directly tied to the log and issue.
In this case, in 2018, I found the process satisfying enough, a reasonable effort. I haven’t used phone or email support since 2019, using this forum and submitting logs when requested by staff on occasion instead. I don’t expect much but am sometimes pleasantly surprised.
It sounds like the experience these days is… not as good? Or varies widely?
Back in the day, if you demonstrated that you had some skill and were documenting things in detail, you got transferred to ‘better’ agents, I think. I remember hearing others back then claim similar, @gemniii comes to mind…
I will echo this sentiment. I am grateful to have access to this Software/Firmware Known Issues list but it means if an issue I see that looks like a bug isn’t on that list I get to live in bug-purgatory. I reported it, submitted a log, contacted customer support but… silence.
This is a bad customer experience.
Customers can deal with disappointment (“We’re not going to fix that, add that, modify that, etc”) but uncertainty is a negative experience.
I wish Wyze did a better job with this. The two it’s clearly a bug issues resulted in a lot of customer service chat time for me and it was clear the CS agent didn’t understand the issue well enough to recognize it wasn’t a hardware failure, it was a software bug. That was also really frustrating.
You’d think Wyze, with its very savvy tech-product leadership team, would understand that there are tech experts out there using their products and, while they sometimes get it wrong, they can be a real asset for the development and debugging process. Just got to use them effectively.
IMO, the Wyze approach to dealing with bugs and issues with their software is akin to driving in India. There are no rules. Anyone can drive anywhere at any time in any direction and if you get there safely you have succeeded. Take your chances again tomorrow. With no rules, no clear direction, no order: chaos ensues.
Right now, logs submitted are useless unless a DEVELOPER looks at them, The CS ‘Wizards’ cannot look at them and wouldn’t know what they are looking at if they did.
There are multiple platforms used (Discord, Facebook, Reddit) wherein Wyze actually solicits the reporting of these bugs and problems yet has no central status reporting feature as discussed above nor a way to track that in real time and publish it to update all users with specifics.
This is chaos, and disorganized chaos at that because there is no critical information data gathering on the front end that would identify hardware specifics, OS, App and FW versions when the bug or issue is initially reported. A simple web input form with data fields would capture all the data needed that would answer the many questions that get asked back and forth over and over… what OS are you using, what is the version number, what is the firmware number, which cam was that for, what version of the app are you using.
And lastly, there should be NO NEED for reporting or discussion of these bugs in any forum anywhere. (Alpha and Beta Testers should be on a private login credential forum with direct access and contact with specific WyzeTeam developers). Wyze needs to seriously tighten up the QA and get it right BEFORE IT IS RELEASED! The release of buggy software just shows a lack of stringent policy and procedures in the Wyze organization and a clear disregard for Quality Assurance. Platform stability is critical.
You’re confident they don’t have an organized process all this chaos sorts into? I assumed they must have.
With Segment and Braze, they have software/services that aggregate data and unify their efforts to work with it. I figured they must have comparable stuff to bug track, project manage, etc.
I have no background in any of this, just making what seems to me a reasonable guess.
(Also figure they must like on some level customers getting all up in their business (the digital exhaust from which is aggregated and unified into something AI alchemical. ))
I would predict they do have something internally for their workflow tracking and management. What is missing in this situation is the front loading of highly specified data points from the user reporting side and a detailed and organized bug publication report that can then be viewed and tracked by affected users.
People also assume that logs are like cockpit recorders in aircraft. For the most part they are not though some server logs are close. Logs only record the events they are programmed to record. It’s not unusual to see the “symptom” recorded as the event with no idea as to the cause. With the amount of logs they’ve received on this, I doubt they’ve been of much use.
What we do know is there was a firmware version for the hardware that didn’t have a problem. In plain English, you start there and then figure out what you broke. It’s a painful process, side by side, step by step with full bit logging as you go. For many devs, we’d rather go to the dentist
Normally everything is done via email from that point forward, but I have had the occasional phone call as well.
Mind you, it’s been over a year since my last need to do that, so I can’t speak for how well that works now… But I’ll be finding out shortly as I have a bricked base station from the faulty firmware update.
I wish I would have suggested that!.. Oh wait… I did!
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though I don’t know if she coined it. She has the hair of twenty women and the confidence of twenty more! 
