Smugmug support are no heroes...

bkrodgers

So much for "Heroes." A month or so ago I discovered that many of my videos uploaded from my phone weren't processing. They'd never get out of processing phase. I'd also noticed that at some point the UI had been changed in a way that caused the transport controls for videos (the ones that would play) to be blocked out by the caption section (using the horizontal collage layout), leaving no way to pause, change quality, volume, or seek within the videos. Both of these were pretty critical issues and rendered video completely useless for me. So I reported them. After a few back and forths on the upload issue, my assigned "Hero" finally recognized it as an existing issue they'd known about for a few weeks. Vertically shot videos simply didn't work. Period. All comments about the merits of vertical video aside, that struck me as a pretty serious bug. So I asked when it'd be fixed. I was told they had no ETA. The UI bug they acknowledged, but also wouldn't provide me any info about what they were going to do about it. They did not offer to keep me posted on either issue.

I emailed back a week later asking for an update. Again I was told they had no ETA. I waited another two weeks and sent another request for update. When I was told they still had no ETA, I wrote back and said that I didn't feel like this issue was getting the attention it deserved as a very critical flaw in the video feature. All I wanted to know was that it was getting the attention it needed and a rough ETA of when to expect a fix. At that point it'd been at least 5 weeks on the vertical video issue -- 3 weeks since I had reported it, and at least two weeks for the "couple of weeks" they'd said it was already broken when I reported it. They wrote back and said "we don't publish ETAs on fixes. This is just not something that will likely change, however we appreciate your feedback on it. If this is something you feel you must have, SmugMug may unfortunately not be the service for you."

Wow. I'm truly floored by this. Now I am a software engineer myself, and I do understand the process of investigating, fixing, testing, and rolling out changes. I've been doing it for over 10 years. But I also know that when my team has broken a feature in a critical way, we're expected to drop all enhancement work and prioritize it above everything else. We investigate it and schedule an emergency release for it. But we'd also make sure our customers knew we cared about the issue and were working hard to get it fixed. And as soon as we knew when we can fix it, we'd communicate that. I do realize that many companies take the attitude that their customers have no right to know when new features will roll out. And some even take that attitude for bug fixes. But that doesn't make it right. We're paying for a service, and wanting to know when it will work is not an unreasonable request. To be told that smugmug doesn't want me as a customer because I expect the service to work is shocking. And if they don't want my business, I certainly not inclined to give it to them. It makes me sad that I'm being told to leave a service that I've enjoyed now for many years -- when it works properly -- over this.

I wrote back and expressed my concern with his attitude, and was simply told "Thank you for your feedback." No apology, no suggestion that I'd misunderstood his statement and that smugmug really did want to keep me as a customer.

tomnovy

Hi bkrogers,

I am very sorry about this, but the issue with vertical videos have been solved few days ago. Are you still experiencing this problem?

bkrodgers

Yes, it was solved on the web site, though it's still having issues on the Android app. The issue itself isn't my point here. The point of my post is my shock that smugmug would not want customers if they expect to be kept up to date on progress of fixing bugs on the service they pay for. I've never been told by a company that they don't want me as a customer because I wanted to know when something that was seriously broken would be fixed. I think that's something other customers might want to know.

tomnovy

Bkrodgers,

I understand your frustration. But sometimes it is very hard to give an estimated time on when certain issues will be resolved. Some bugs are more complex than others and we do not want to promise a date to our customers and then not be able to solve it in time. The vertical video bug was a very complex bug, but in the end our engineers have solved it.

bkrodgers

I understand that it can be hard to give that estimate. But ultimately if the service is broken, providing an ETA or at a very minimum, updates on progress is part of what companies that care about support do. They do not tell customers they don't want them and make them feel they're being too much of a pest for wanting to know that something is being done to resolve it.

I understand that we may have to accept that kind of thing from free/ad supported services, but if we're paying a company for a service, it isn't unreasonable to expect some kind of update more than "No ETA" for something that's been broken for more than a month. As far as I know when I'm told "No ETA" repeatedly over several weeks, nobody's working on it. Or if they are, they have made no progress and a fix may not come for months, or ever. "No ETA" when it's first reported is fine. The same "No ETA" after weeks is not.