So, I had an issue. Seeking support, I went through Zwift’s pages, and performed what I thought of as “support request.”
I specifically selected not to be helped by one of Zwift “Ambassadors”. Not because I do not value volunteers willing to contribute their time and attention to others, but because I feel this is Zwift’s way of avoiding support issues.
To my surprise, I was contacted by an Ambassador. Apparently, Zwift has taken the liberty of ignoring my request. The data I provided in my original request was gone. Obviously, the Ambassador was unable to access any of my ride data.
Not surprisingly, the set of suggestions I received was exactly those I expected, those that keep popping up for years now: something with my machine, my equipment, my bike/PC physical arrangement, the weather, the phase of the moon, etc. (Not to say these are all invalid suggestions - its just that I am no novice Zwifter, have been around for a couple of years now and experienced my share of issues - something the Ambassador couldn’t have been aware of.) Having invested enough in exploring the common solutions I did specify the support path I prefer - only to be ignored, and pushed to explore irrelevant paths (I even made the effort to technically isolate the issue - it was positively a Zwift related bug.)
If there is a way of reaching Zwift support, I am now lost as to which it is, as the impression I got was the “Ambassador” has no way of escalating/routing to that level.
Again, I have no issue with the “Ambassador” institute. I do have an issue with Zwift steering people away from conventional support, only to find themselves with nothing. Also, sending people away as a way of avoiding dealing with technical issue (=bugs) is not what I would have expected of Zwift.
By the time I tried the latest update, I found another bug (a bug, not something for which there can be a workaround.) As things stand, and based on past experience, I will refrain from trying to provide this info.
They are just trying to help by filtering out all the obvious problems most people encounter.
You will have to follow the path until it lead you to the level of support that can fix your problem.
You may want to describe you problem as many of us on the forum will be able to assist or if it is something we have seen we can point you in that direction.
Thanks, @Gerrie_Delport_ODZ … - but I will not be forced to use someone’s help just because they are enthusiastic - especially if that path leads nowhere: it is a dead-end. Not if I was given the option to choose - which was ignored.
My problem was “solved” the most outrageous way possible (in my view) - which I will not describe in order to not encourage such “solutions” in the future.
I have been helped, and learnt a lot by people here - but the bugs I bring are rarely addressed by Zwift (some have been ignored for years). I thank those who helped, expressed interest and concern - but Zwift seems not to care, and put obstacles in obtaining support.
Would someone please enlighten me as to how does one get to Zwift support? (any path that leads there will do. Thanks!)
We’re all frustrated with support and bugs but your post comes across as ripping on the ambassadors and quite frankly THEY are the ones that are helpful. Yes, they can’t fix the bugs, but that’s not really their fault. The path seems to be report the bug here on the forums and maybe it goes into a black hole, maybe it goes into a backlog. No one really knows. BUT I come on here every week looking for bugs and work around so I can help others so reporting publicly does at least help some of us know it’s not just us.
Ambassadors can escalate/forward on requests to zwift but as you say it’s a bit frustrating. Along with the closure of support mailbox you have to go through the web contact every time even if it’s for an existing issue.
MY Ambassador didn’t offer any escalation path. Nothing. “repeat and prey” was my impression.
@Sara_Perrin_REVO: you missed my point - I greatly appreciate their help (and have said so multiple times) - but the institute itself (not the constituents) exemplifies the problem.
If we all agree to “workarounds”, we will never get bugs fixed: Zwift will have “solved” the problem. The “Ambassadors” will always be busy, and we can all merrily ride on. The cost of effective QA and S/W development will have been shouldered onto these volunteers, costing Zwift nothing.
I completely agree that the situation is bad. I don’t like the workarounds either. For me, the game has almost been unplayable since they went to server side pack. But trying to go through support just pisses me off even more since they step one is to blame the user so I suffer through the workarounds hoping for a better option to come along.
Completely valid viewpoint. Zwift support is terrible. This forum is a case in point. It used to be a positive place where people talked about rumours about the next update, all the good things that were happening on zwift and all that was good with the game. Now it is just a list of ongoing issues that the community is having to solve because zwift are so inept.
I dread to think how bad zwift would be without the dedicated unpaid support of the community. Quite frankly it’s embarrassing for zwift how bad things have got. Huge investment but the game is going backwards not forwards. Little new improvement or development of the game. UI still looks like something out of the 70s. Every update releases new bugs into the game. Still a completely complicated onboarding for new users. Complete lack of new gameplay or innovation.
Zwift can improve it’s release/QA cycle so as to lower the number of bugs introduced with each update.
So… why isn’t it happening (or, why hasn’t it been happening fast enough?)
If you go by the logic in the following article, Zwift has made a conscious choice (again, if you follow and agree with the article’s logic… and my reasoning) to have us Zwifters provide pear-support through these forums (…and by becoming “Ambassadors”) as an expane-saving measure, adopting the client-as-testers policy, fixing only what is absolutely necessary.
If (if!) this is the case (and again, I have no link with Zwift so I can’t really tell…) - what we experience is intended, no coincidental. Zwift creates the platform (the forums) - support to the game will be provided (for free…) by us Zwifters.
Yes, of course this is the case. I suppose in the software industry today your customer value should be at least a five-figure one to be able to reliably expect the kind of support where someone is actually interested in solving your problem rather than just going through stock answers one by one. Getting peer users rather than staff to recite the magic spells is obviously more cost-effective.
Where this model really breaks up with Zwift is the fragility of the software in terms of both persistent and new bugs and the support needs it creates. Just saying…
Ambassadors can raise bugs to support, but there is no feedback mechanism or way of keeping you updated so you never know if it will be resolved or not…
I raised one in the week and had this response from an ambassador:
My problem with ‘ambassadors’ is much simpler. If I ask a question via on-line chat I get an email reply with a link in it. Whatever I try, though, I just get taken to the support page. What, pls, am I doing wrong?
First and foremost, thank you for sharing feedback on our current Ambassador program. This was rolled out about a year ago, and we’ve seen some great things come out of this. Ambassadors have been able to connect with the community and get more members riding and running! This is not to say that it is perfect right now. There are some hiccups along the way, and our team is committed to making the changes to assure that our community is receiving the help they need.
To clarify, there is a very specific path that leads you to our Ambassadors, and we’ve also funneled some support queries here to get answers back to our members even quicker. This has led to confusion, and we will address that more explicitly in our channels. If an Ambassador cannot help our members, they have the ability to escalate this to our team here at HQ (this is a seamless hand off from Ambassador to our support team, so no resubmission is required). We will make sure that this is addressed moving forward.
We are continuing to take away learnings and make adjustments to this program. We absolutely value the input here, and I hope that we continue to have these open conversations.
Hi,
I recently reported a software issue via support and got a reply from a well-meaning Zwift ambassador who through no fault of their own was unable to help or escalate my queries. They also sent me to the forum where I (and others) had already reported the problem.
Here’s what I wrote:
"The way sprint and KOM jerseys work appears to have changed and/or has some bugs. I tried asking about this on the forum and verified its happening universally but no Zwift staff stepped up in to answer queries posed there.
There are two basic problems described at length at the link below. But basically for sprints and KOMs, each time you pass through the finish line your time is updated on the leaderboard even if your most recent time is slower than the previous time. It used to be that your fastest time held for an hour or so no matter how many times you did the sprint or climb in a session. This completely messes up group rides based on competing on best time for sprint overall for multiple lap sessions.
The other problem is that the jerseys are not appearing on the right person on the riders nearby list. They often on appear on the wrong person, usually someone who held it previously.
Both problems are described in detail on the forum and it would be really nice to have a response from Zwift and to know whether the change to the leaderboard was intentional or is a bug. "
Here’s reply I received.from an Ambassador:
"Thank you for reaching out to us today and also for pointing this out again.
I’m sure that the Zwift tech team are aware as it appears to be an issue affecting a number of users and it’s on the forums.
As an ambassador I don’t have the power to sort this, but hopefully it will be resolved soon.
Thanks again and Ride On."
I replied:
"The reason I wrote here is to get some acknowledgment of the issue. No staff from the forum has acknowledged the thread (despite being asked); it has not been marked as a known issue so there is no reason to assume they know about it. Nor has any Zwift staff answered the direct question as to whether this is an intentional change or a bug. While it is not in your purview to fix the issue I would hope that you would be able to send this up to the food chain to tech to make sure they are indeed aware and, on your side, as a customer service ambassador to help communicate an answer back on the straight forward question being asked. Is this new feature or a bug? If it is a bug, is it being addressed? I have resorted to writing here because there was no acknowledgement on the forum despite one being asked for by multiple parties.
Your help in making sure this is properly communicated about to tech and back to users like myself is very much appreciated."
The ambassador replied
"I’m afraid I don’t have a code to be able to pass this along.
I wish I could help you further, but the forum is the best place to report this.
Thanks."
So there seems to be two problems which are compounding each other. The first is that Zwift is not dedicating staff (or enough staff) to monitor and respond to real queries about software problems on this forum despite directing users to use it for support. Over the past six months I have seen fewer and fewer responses from staff on the forum (especially in threads on bugs and problems). The second is that Zwift is using volunteers (or at least non-employees) that it has not empowered with agency to report real problems up the food chain but told them redirect users to the forum. This creates the loop the original poster mentioned, where problems don’t readily get acknowledged, let alone fixed.
As you can imagine, this is frustrating for users. It also doesn’t strike me as fair or nice way to use the Ambassadors as it makes them the frontline target for frustrated users. (I personally didn’t know that an Ambassador was not Zwift staff until I saw this thread and am sure I am not alone.)
I think the problem needs to be addressed on two fronts: more responsiveness on tech/software bug reports from actual staff on the forum and empowering Ambassadors to actually escalate issues consistently.
The basic functionality of Zwift (from resistence issues on popular trainers to malfunctioning chat to jersey problems) seems to be degrading and it’s not being acknowledged in a meaningful way.
Apologies for the long post and thanks for your attention and help.
I hope no-one takes this personally, but I would never have agreed to serve as an “Ambassador”, given the current state of support (had I been invited to join…)
Although I greatly appreciate people investing their time - uncompensated - to help others, the question of to which extent such help actually allows this state of support to persist is inevitable.
My apologies to all those good people, with (undoubtedly!) good intentions - but my take is the “Ambassador” function perpetuates this sad state of affairs, not improving on it.
Specifically asked issue to be routed to tech support, not an “Ambassador”
Guess what? My request was completely ignored (@Josie_L: just one more example of how Zwift ignores paying clients.) Selecting “Chat” invariably leads to “We will connect you to our community support agents shortly”, without bothering to ask.
And here is a relevant quote form an “Ambassador”: “I’m sorry your query was routed through to myself, the system decides who best to route queries to.”
And then: “We’re sorry but this message could not be answered by a Zwift Ambassador, please visit Zwift Community Support”
Support has officially became a black-hole, a dead end.
