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I remember about two years ago when I reported a bug in the Hubspot Form API Zap where they weren't handling one of Hubspot's documented return codes properly.

I remember about two years ago when I reported a bug in the Hubspot Form API Zap where they weren't handling one of Hubspot's documented return codes properly. Basically their zap was only handling one success code and one failure code when actually there were two different types of success. I documented the issue, linked Hubspot's API docs confirming it, submitted a ticket through their normal support portal and had a confirmed bug from a Zapier engineer within an hour. The fix was live before I came back from lunch about an hour later. This is why they're successful. If I submit a bug report in Blink (usually major text rendering/CSS issues), a Google employee will look at the issue a month later, maybe. If I submit a bug report in one of their APIs, if it isn't Adwords and isn't customer impacting, the response is basically a middle finger/"we will fix never". Zapier made a lot of my contracting work way easier and often I get the client involved and they become self-sufficient. Zapier should pay me money! kidding

ec109685 8y ago
Slack is also super responsive when you file a ticket and in some cases have pushed out a change in a few hours. They accept tickets and issues from anyone (not just admins). I wouldn’t even know how to file a ticket with GDocs.
- arsalanb 8y ago
  Can you explain the last sentence? Sort of blew my mind..
  - Swizec 8y ago
    Like if you find a bug in Google Docs ... what do you do? Scream into the pillow? Work around it? Complain on twitter?
  - Lukas_Skywalker 8y ago
    I believe OP meant "file a bug for GDocs", not "file a bug using GDocs".
    - arsalanb 8y ago
      Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking of how one could file a bug using GDocs and it was an interesting idea. Thanks!
      - cannonedhamster 8y ago
        Theoretically I think it's possible to submit bugs using GDocs especially since you can essentially use Javascript to do so. The coding engine is pretty powerful. I can imagine using forms to do so.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  My home address has been bugged in Google Maps for months. When you enter it, Google Maps modifies it for some reason and makes it point to the wrong location. I've sent a bunch of reports and "feedback" in about it but it all just seems to go into a black hole without even being acknowledged.
- omnimus 8y ago
  For example Google Fonts - there are several very good and popular open-source fonts that still (after years) waiting to get pulled into the service. You can just look at the tickets at https://github.com/google/fonts https://github.com/google/fonts This is quite suprising to me because i think google this way gets their snooping JS on lot of websites. It generates data for them. Sure they also have to host it... but then again this is just matter of accepting pull request.
acidbaseextract 8y ago
If anyone from Zapier is reading, how do you folks do it? What does your support staff look like? Do you have allocated support engineers? I'm on a team of fiveish serving a whole company of fiftyish. Sometimes we resolve issues quickly, but often it pains me how long resolutions take. I'd love to do better but it's not clear how, short of staffing an engineer towards those reactive things specifically.
- LeonidBugaev 8y ago
  I work at Tyk.io and our average response time is less than an hour. If we talking about resolution time, it is about few weeks (depending on release cycle). But overall we are so good at it, because all team members, including engineers, do the support. There is some "first line" of support, which answer basic questions, and re-directs to the related person. Additionally, since we are a remote team (same as Zapier), we have team members across all over the globe, and literally 24 hours online. Involving engineers into support is not cheap, but it pays off with extraordinary customer loyalty. And for sure a lot of automation, extensive internal and external FAQs, and good documentation.
  - eliseumds 8y ago
    New ticket: don't intervene with the user scroll in your home page. It's painful. (I'm on a mobile device)
    - LeonidBugaev 8y ago
      Yeah, we are aware of it. In process of fixing.
kowdermeister 8y ago
Chrome vs. Zapier is an unfair comparison. Chrome is ~6.7 million lines of code and takes hours to build while Zapier is probably a microsevice architecture and is easier to update a component / validate an issue.
- busterarm 8y ago
  I'm not _just_ talking about Chrome. I think that you would be hard-pressed to find any Google product where you'll find a responsive support channel.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    Having humans doing customer service is not something google will ever do well. It’s not in their DNA. They are all about solving big problems with fancy algorithms. There is a reason Google keeps on making failed social networking products and a 100 messaging apps. They are far more interested in algorithms that can scale than messy little customer issues. The problem is that you can’t deliver great customer service with algorithms just yet.
    - tech_tuna 8y ago
      Couldn't agree with you more. Google is not a people-company.
  - juancampa 8y ago
    Yet Google is very successful
    - tech_tuna 8y ago
      At selling ads.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Had a major DNS bug with Google DNS, it was on their side and they were completely messing up how they were handling some requests. Took them 2 months or so to fix it, they never described what happened, never said what was broken, and it took finding resources inside the company to solve. Google doesn't functionally have support for many of their paying services, nevermind their non-paid services.
kilroy123 8y ago
I agree and had a similar experience with them. Plus, their suite of integrations just work.
murukesh_s 8y ago
>If it isn't Adwords and isn't customer impacting I think that explains it. >Zapier made a lot of my contracting work way easier and often I get the client involved Could you please elaborate more? Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be?
- corobo 8y ago
  > Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be? For me it'd be a price point between free and 25/mo. I like the product and would have so many uses for it.. but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need Same. There are several things I want to do with Zapier but at the free tier I have to limit it to one if I want it to for sure work all month. I'm not using it for business, I'm using it to make things a little easier for myself wholly unrelated to any income generating thing so it's just not worth paying 25$ a month to me so for right now I only use it to get text messages when I get email from a specific individual.
    - 1123581321 8y ago
      What kind of scenario is worth $12.50 but not $25 to you? In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool so that an individual can afford to under-use it.
      - ryanmercer 8y ago
        >In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool SAAS isn't exclusively a business service and many, many, many services have multiple pricing tiers. In fact, Zapier has multiple tiers... for businesses 'starting at 20$' and for teams 'starting at 250$' a month. They scale price based on how much you use the service. With the free tier you are limited to two 'zaps', they run less frequently, you don't have access to multi-step, you have a rather finite limit on how many times they can run each month etc. It's just bizarre there isn't a lower tier. I mean, it's even more than my squarespace hosting and squarespace has a 12$ and 18$ tier. Or evernote. Or any number of other services. I'd happily pay 5$ a month for considerably more functionality but I'm not trying to automate an entire business and 20-25$ or more is nowhere near justifiable. Sure, if you make 6 figures maybe you're like "hey 20$ to handle some weird email situations for me and make some docs automatically, sure!" but for the majority of people it's a "well, guess I won't be giving them anything".

ec109685 8y ago

Slack is also super responsive when you file a ticket and in some cases have pushed out a change in a few hours. They accept tickets and issues from anyone (not just admins). I wouldn’t even know how to file a ticket with GDocs.

arsalanb 8y ago
Can you explain the last sentence? Sort of blew my mind..
- Swizec 8y ago
  Like if you find a bug in Google Docs ... what do you do? Scream into the pillow? Work around it? Complain on twitter?
- Lukas_Skywalker 8y ago
  I believe OP meant "file a bug for GDocs", not "file a bug using GDocs".
  - arsalanb 8y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking of how one could file a bug using GDocs and it was an interesting idea. Thanks!
    - cannonedhamster 8y ago
      Theoretically I think it's possible to submit bugs using GDocs especially since you can essentially use Javascript to do so. The coding engine is pretty powerful. I can imagine using forms to do so.
Deimorz 8y ago
My home address has been bugged in Google Maps for months. When you enter it, Google Maps modifies it for some reason and makes it point to the wrong location. I've sent a bunch of reports and "feedback" in about it but it all just seems to go into a black hole without even being acknowledged.
omnimus 8y ago
For example Google Fonts - there are several very good and popular open-source fonts that still (after years) waiting to get pulled into the service. You can just look at the tickets at https://github.com/google/fonts https://github.com/google/fonts This is quite suprising to me because i think google this way gets their snooping JS on lot of websites. It generates data for them. Sure they also have to host it... but then again this is just matter of accepting pull request.

acidbaseextract 8y ago

If anyone from Zapier is reading, how do you folks do it? What does your support staff look like? Do you have allocated support engineers? I'm on a team of fiveish serving a whole company of fiftyish. Sometimes we resolve issues quickly, but often it pains me how long resolutions take. I'd love to do better but it's not clear how, short of staffing an engineer towards those reactive things specifically.

LeonidBugaev 8y ago
I work at Tyk.io and our average response time is less than an hour. If we talking about resolution time, it is about few weeks (depending on release cycle). But overall we are so good at it, because all team members, including engineers, do the support. There is some "first line" of support, which answer basic questions, and re-directs to the related person. Additionally, since we are a remote team (same as Zapier), we have team members across all over the globe, and literally 24 hours online. Involving engineers into support is not cheap, but it pays off with extraordinary customer loyalty. And for sure a lot of automation, extensive internal and external FAQs, and good documentation.
- eliseumds 8y ago
  New ticket: don't intervene with the user scroll in your home page. It's painful. (I'm on a mobile device)
  - LeonidBugaev 8y ago
    Yeah, we are aware of it. In process of fixing.

kowdermeister 8y ago

Chrome vs. Zapier is an unfair comparison. Chrome is ~6.7 million lines of code and takes hours to build while Zapier is probably a microsevice architecture and is easier to update a component / validate an issue.

busterarm 8y ago
I'm not _just_ talking about Chrome. I think that you would be hard-pressed to find any Google product where you'll find a responsive support channel.
- nojvek 8y ago
  Having humans doing customer service is not something google will ever do well. It’s not in their DNA. They are all about solving big problems with fancy algorithms. There is a reason Google keeps on making failed social networking products and a 100 messaging apps. They are far more interested in algorithms that can scale than messy little customer issues. The problem is that you can’t deliver great customer service with algorithms just yet.
  - tech_tuna 8y ago
    Couldn't agree with you more. Google is not a people-company.
- juancampa 8y ago
  Yet Google is very successful
  - tech_tuna 8y ago
    At selling ads.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  Had a major DNS bug with Google DNS, it was on their side and they were completely messing up how they were handling some requests. Took them 2 months or so to fix it, they never described what happened, never said what was broken, and it took finding resources inside the company to solve. Google doesn't functionally have support for many of their paying services, nevermind their non-paid services.

kilroy123 8y ago

I agree and had a similar experience with them. Plus, their suite of integrations just work.

murukesh_s 8y ago

>If it isn't Adwords and isn't customer impacting I think that explains it. >Zapier made a lot of my contracting work way easier and often I get the client involved Could you please elaborate more? Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be?

corobo 8y ago
> Also if you ever wish one missing feature in Zapier, what would it be? For me it'd be a price point between free and 25/mo. I like the product and would have so many uses for it.. but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >but I'm a person not a business and $25/mo is a bit too steep for what I need Same. There are several things I want to do with Zapier but at the free tier I have to limit it to one if I want it to for sure work all month. I'm not using it for business, I'm using it to make things a little easier for myself wholly unrelated to any income generating thing so it's just not worth paying 25$ a month to me so for right now I only use it to get text messages when I get email from a specific individual.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    What kind of scenario is worth $12.50 but not $25 to you? In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool so that an individual can afford to under-use it.
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
      >In general, it doesn’t make sense to price a business tool SAAS isn't exclusively a business service and many, many, many services have multiple pricing tiers. In fact, Zapier has multiple tiers... for businesses 'starting at 20$' and for teams 'starting at 250$' a month. They scale price based on how much you use the service. With the free tier you are limited to two 'zaps', they run less frequently, you don't have access to multi-step, you have a rather finite limit on how many times they can run each month etc. It's just bizarre there isn't a lower tier. I mean, it's even more than my squarespace hosting and squarespace has a 12$ and 18$ tier. Or evernote. Or any number of other services. I'd happily pay 5$ a month for considerably more functionality but I'm not trying to automate an entire business and 20-25$ or more is nowhere near justifiable. Sure, if you make 6 figures maybe you're like "hey 20$ to handle some weird email situations for me and make some docs automatically, sure!" but for the majority of people it's a "well, guess I won't be giving them anything".