So disgusted with the lack of support from Meraki

[CraigCummings]

Tried to call Meraki support because, apparently, the Layer 7 rule to "block all p2p" traffic is also blocking Meraki's own comm traffic on UDP 7351 (nice work). 

After being psychologically tortured with everyone's favorite hold music for 20 mins, the brilliantly engineered system at one of the world's foremost communication technology companies simply disconnected me. 

Called back, going on 25 mins now. Wish me luck. 

Tried opening an email support case since Meraki can't be bothered to staff the call center appropriately, but it literally won't let me hit the Send button (well played).

This level of support, or lack thereof, is beyond pathetic when considering the outrageous prices we pay for "enterprise support".  So disgusted.  This level of service should be illegal. 

[CraigCummings]

45 mins later, someone finally answers...

[PhilipDAth]

Wow that is crappy.  What part of the world are you in?

[CraigCummings]

Edmond, OK, USA

[BlakeRichardson]

Did you try opening the support ticket in another web browser it could be as simple as something like that.

Re phone delay I've never called support, I don't have time to sit on hold so I always use the online ticket option. 

Not good that you are having a bad time with support. 

[DubyaCO]

Welcome to the Meraki of the last couple years. Sad, but I pretty well expect that if I need to talk to someone it will be a minimum of an hour wait anymore. Email responses aren't much better either.

[CraigCummings]

I find that email responses tend to drag out much longer.  For the money we pay:

1. we should be able to get someone on the phone within 30 mins or less, and I'm being generous. 

2. not be psychologically tortured with hold music

3. not be abruptly disconnected

4. not be told after all that, that yes, it's a known issue, no eta

Why doesn't Meraki implement some kind of notification system like Microsoft has.  It could eliminate so many calls and so much wasted time, for us and for Meraki.  Just mind boggling.  

[DubyaCO]

Honestly even just making the hold music a consistent volume would be a huge improvement. That way you don't have to constantly think someone has answered only to have the music re-increase in volume. 

1 hour 28 minutes and still waiting. For those considering meraki this really is the level of support you can expect.

[CraigCummings]

That's not gonna be good enough for me.  🙂  I mean, my god, how much does it cost to add like a whole song...or two, instead of that obnoxious 20 second? loop?  I'm convinced it's intentionally obnoxious and repetitive with the obvious goal of getting people to hang up. Whoever's making this decision is either incredibly cheap or sadistic, maybe both. 

And how hard would it be to schedule callbacks instead of forcing people to tortured on hold?  I mean, much smaller organizations with a fraction of Meraki's resources seem to be able to offer callback options, why can't Meraki be bothered to do this? 

[ww]

I Wish they had a bug toolkit/ search tool like cisco.

It would help customers and less calls for support

[CraigCummings]

From now on, I think when I do get a Meraki support engineer on the phone, I'm going to play my own obnoxious repetitive loop in the background...for the entire duration of the call. 

[cmr]

I know it doesn't help, but in the UK I have called a few times recently and been on hold for 10-15 minutes each time, never been cut off and had a helpful person assist.  I'm guessing there must be a recruitment issue in the US at the moment.

[BHC_RESORTS]

The L7 rule for P2P is very, very broken and has been since the switch to NBAR. We unfortunately had to disable it and create breakout rules for the most popular P2P apps like Bittorrent.

[GiacomoS]

Good morning team,

I'd like to thank you for the feedback in this thread. 

I am truly sorry if the experience you had has not always been great, we hear your concerns and we consistently discuss ways for us to turn that around and ensure you have a great time whenever you contact us. At times we get it right, at times we need to improve and it sounds like in this case we have some more work to do.

Please, do keep in mind that there's a human being on the other end of the phone or dashboard case; I know that at times some of the problems are particularly impactful and frustrating, and I can assure you that the engineers are here to support at the best of their capabilities and that we are all on the same side when it comes to resolving issues. 

Support normally always tries to ask for a contact phone number in case the call gets disconnected, but it sounds like in this case it may have been disconnected before the agent could ask for the details.

@CraigCummings , I'd like to look a bit better into what happened; would you mind sending me a direct message with some details around the time when you called and from what number and a case reference if you had one already please?

Regarding the Send support case form, that looks very bizarre; did you try typing the Subject instead of auto filling it? Did you see any particular error on the browser console? If you do, could you please also send me a screenshot of that?

I'd also like to acknowledge your messages regarding the hold music. Just to confirm, is this an issue with the music played or the loop being inconsistent (e.g. changes in volume or the music restarting before the track is finished)? I'll bring this up internally to look into. 

Many thanks everyone; I promise we are all striving to give you an effortless experience here and we are on this journey together.

Giac

[CraigCummings]

That’s correct, the state-of-the-art phone system at Cisco disconnected me after 20 mins before a person ever picked up.

I had no complaints with the person that answered.  I rarely do.  He was just doing his job the best he could. 

My problem (other than torturous hold music), is that after wasting an hour of my time on hold and losing just a little more sanity, the tech tells me that “it’s a known issue with no ETA”.  Again, not the tech’s fault.  It’s the fault of his management for not notifying users about known issues. Seemingly a no-brainer, support-delivery-101 practice that would save everyone lots of time and frustration.   The dashboard and/or push notifications from the app would both be great places for this information…a-la Microsoft Message Center.

As for the call timing, I was essentially “live blogging” that experience, so you can just look at the time stamp of my first post (that’s shortly after I was disconnected).

As for the hold music, just go ahead and pick up the phone and call yourself.  It’s like the same 8 bars (if that), on a 20 – 30 second loop, over and over and over again.  It’s quite maddening.   You might as well be playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” or some other ice-cream truck classic. 

I’m glad someone at Meraki is paying attention today, but forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.   I first brought this up about 3 years ago (in the forums) and was assured then by a Meraki employee that they were going to look into it.  They agreed with me that it was super annoying.  Never heard back from them.

BTW, don't even get me started on the ultra-rude, time-wasting practice of using noreply email addresses to correspond so that I have to come back out to the forum and log in vs. simply replying to your email....community-noreply@Meraki.com. Because, what I really need in my life today is yet another login. 

[CraigCummings]

To be fair to the tech, he did offer me 2 work-arounds (which also could have been communicated in a notification vs. making me waste an hour of my life).  I can downgrade the firmware or allow Encrypted P2P traffic.  Neither of these seem appealing to me. 

[GiacomoS]

Hi @CraigCummings ,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I have passed your feedback upwards regarding the notification of ongoing issues. I appreciate that this type of information, unless coming from the firmware change log (for ongoing investigations), may not be always transparent unless you get in touch with us. 

After some digging, I managed to find the call and it seems like it was dropped during queuing. I cannot see any obvious reason for the logs at my disposal, but I'll pass this to our voice team to investigate.

Re the hold music, we've taken that aboard as well and started investigating if this could be modified. I completely understand that in those moments where we are particularly busy and the music plays on repeat for an extended time, it may not give you the best of experiences.

I can't comment too much on the last part, as I'm unsure around the reason around the no-reply. I'll pass the feedback on to the team that looks after the Community site.

Thank you for your patience and working with us here.

Giac

[BHC_RESORTS]

We are huge Meraki fans. But we're forced to agree with some of the points here. We've had a ticket open since January that just got an update - in Spanish. While we are based in California, our Spanish isn't great. Why was it replied to in Spanish? I have no idea. The translation didn't make a lot of sense either, it was talking about VPNs (the issue was with IPV6 WAN, no VPN involved).

We also have had a ticket open requesting an RMA on a switch for a couple weeks, can't get anyone to reply or acknowledge it.

Some changes need to be made at the top level for customer support, or Meraki is going to start losing a lot of enterprise clients that frankly they probably can't afford to lose. You can lose someone spending a couple thousand, but lose a few 7 figure clients, and that isn't sustainable.

Our site wide renewal is in 2024, and we're one of those 7 figure clients that may find ourselves shopping for the first time in many, many years.

[GiacomoS]

Hi @BHC_RESORTS ,

Thank you so much for sharing, and I'm really sorry to hear about all these mix ups. I have identified the relevant cases and will follow up with you through there.

Many thanks!

Giac

[BHC_RESORTS]

For a while now around 50% of the time we can't submit a new ticket. Different browsers, different networks, etc. No matter what you put in, the submit button won't illuminate.

[GiacomoS]

Hey @BHC_RESORTS , 

Does it happen for the same network? For example on network A you can at times submit and at times not? 

I've also asked before if it is possible to provide browser console logs so we can investigate further, as there may be something not loading properly on the page, but it's difficult to identify with just the screenshot of the case form page.

Many thanks!

Giac

[BHC_RESORTS]

@GiacomoS this particular instance I was in SFO using their free WiFi, behind a Cloudflare VPN (Wireguard). I also tried with our traditional VPN. No dice either way.

[BHC_RESORTS]

So in the effort for full transparency, we finally did get a response from support about our IPv6 WAN issue. They confirmed it doesn't work. No ETA on a resolution.

6 months it took for that response.