Customer Service

[AZweimiller]

I feel like HomeSeer customer service has gone downhill. I don't even bother to report issues or bugs anymore. The support reps come across as disinterested or incapable of real troubleshooting. Every interaction is frustrating. When version 4 of the Z-Wave plugin was released, I upgraded and it broke a handful of Z-Wave devices. There were errors in the log during the upgrade and those devices could no longer be controlled. I restored a backup and have periodically tried new versions to see if it would upgrade without breakage. Last week I decided I would really like to upgrade to the new plugin. I tried v4.0.3.0 and saw the same issue and finally reported it to HS support. I included the logged errors and said:

I have rolled back to plugin 3.0.10.0 pending a possible update to prevent the breakage. I'd rather do that and help squash what may be a bug instead of just re-adding these devices by hand. I would be happy to send along my devices database if that helps.

I thought I was clear that I wanted to avoid re-adding the devices manually but also willing to help figure out why only these handful of devices broke. This was the reply I received:

I'm sorry to hear that upgrading the Z-Wave plugin seems to have caused issues. Were you able to control the devices you got these messages for from the Devices page? If they aren't working, we will need to look at removing and re-adding those devices.

I had been hoping for a reply consisting of more than just a suggestion to re-add the devices. I said:

Hey, control is indeed broken for those devices. I suspect re-adding will fix, but as I mentioned in my initial report I am happy to dive deeper. This feels like something Rich may be interested in trying to address in the plugin itself, to avoid breakage for other users in the future. Reading the devices feels like a bandaid rather than a fix that will help everyone. If you guys can tell me what diagnostic data will help, I can provide it.

This is what I received:

I understand, unfortunately for this issue we will need to look at removing and re-adding the Z-Wave devices.

At this point my case was closed by the support rep. It was closed without confirming that re-adding the devices actually fixed my issue. This in of itself is poor customer service. This is my only recent example but is very indicative of the overall support experience. I expressed a willingness to go the distance to help identify a potential bug and was shut down. How do we actually report bugs with this software if this is the response we get?

I admit, I probably have higher expectations due to my day job running a MSP helpdesk. That being said, I would hope that HomeSeer could strive for better than this.

[wpiman]

Did you post this on the forums somewhere? This looks like your only post. I post bugs only after I hit up the user community.

[AZweimiller]

Did you post this on the forums somewhere? This looks like your only post. I post bugs only after I hit up the user community.

Sometimes I do start with the forums, just not in this case. It was my instinct that it was a bug in the new v4 of the Z-Wave Plugin. My understanding was that does a data conversion of the Z-Wave database. This is one of the reasons the upgrade is permanent, unless you restore from a backup. Here is the error I received:

Creation of Z-Wave plug-in object from HomeSeer data for device Upstairs Master Bedroom Adam's Lamp was UNSUCCESSFUL.

Cannot recreate a node from the HomeSeer device - population of the node DATA object failed. (Unable to cast object of type 'System.String' to type 'System.Byte[]'.)

This feels like a failure of the plugin migration logic to convert a certain datatype. It feels like a bug in the plugin, or at least a weird edge case that may need to be accounted for. Either way, once I wrote it up, I sent it directly to HS support. Considering that this is commercial software with support, I'm just calling out that support for being frustrating and ineffectual. HST has specifically requested we submit tickets for things like this as the forum is not monitored for issues at that level. I don't really agree that I did something wrong by skipping a forum post. I apologize if that's not what you were implying.