Devices, poor experience and no customer service help. *Warning to all*

Marley,

I wish technical information regarding the limits of water resistance was on the label. My camera was located on the underside of the roof minimal water contact and yet the battery terminal was damage. This is only after 1 year and a half of ownership. $200 down the drain. An item designed specific to outdoor application should have lasted longer than this. And the fact that no where on the actual label states the limits of water resistance does not warn or advise to purchase an aftermarket protector. Furthermore these accessories should be offered by ring as a RECOMMENDATION. By completed disregarding the topic altogether on a product specifically designed for outdoor use, is not proper marketing ethic.

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I apologize for the excessive rant. I’d like to say it wasn’t my intention to stir the pot, but I really just wanted answers to commonplace issues that simply could’ve & should’ve been resolved sooner. I will pull this post down here soon but I wanted to acknowledge the timely response given by the admin. Every area is different, so every service varies and my run of the mill happenings trying to reach customer support or have a continuing solid signal is only my issue and nobody elses, so it doesn’t reflect the company as a whole. But I would like to just add that yes this is a different email bc it began under my moms account which I eventually took over and transferred the rest of the subscription over along with. And that specific issue regarding videos was something I called in about when it was still under her email that I had access to but was in the hospital. And I reached out while in there to see if they could extend it by a week due to the subscription ending one of the days I was in there, so I had just realized at that point that it was ending and will disappear by the following day. It was bad timing yes. But prior to I did not know they disappeared from the server of the acct holder. So when they said they couldn’t do anything and I had to download the videos, I was laid up in the hospital attempting to manually do each one via my phone and unfortunately the rest is history.
That’s just an issue that I wish the company could fix or allow videos that are starred to stay on the acct holders cloud indefinitely, or just better yet the ability to mass select and download those videos. In the end this is an issue of mine, reflects my problems and nobody elses nor the company. Its merely a feature I wish they could implement so nobody in the future goes through the conundrum I did. Thank you admin for your response and demeanor toward my rash remarks.

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I fully agree with you. Recently I bought my first video doorbell, but especially the poor support in the installation, answering many questions, and unreliable working of the camera I think this will be my last purchase as well.

I tried the community, but - as I got it in a reply to my complaint - community people are just volunteers, sharing their experience, but NOT an official support from Ring.

When you encounter serious technical concerns, issues, you want more than just hunting in the thousands of community discussion.

My camera records mostly the back of a person who is leaving the front door, but not when he is approaching, so face is not visible (camera motion sensitivity set to High)
It records passing cars, but not the postman dropping in letters. (People Only mode enabled…)
Camera do not respond at all for more than 24 hours, until someone pushed the doorbell.
I could not reach (activate) the camera remotely from another friend’s wifi network, ut only through 4G gsm network. Even then activation takes so long, that the person ringing my doorbell has left, so I have no chance to talk to him.

Should I mention more? This seems a quality issue, and all what I got from the community was to reset the camera to factory default…

I would need a better support to use more Ring device, not even talking about to promote it to my friends

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I have a bunch of ideas as to fix your issues. But I’m only a community member. So I won’t bother. But Ring does have a customer service. So, why not give them a call. Also, you do realize that every phone can be different, every wifi can be different and every mounting can be different. So, there are many things to check. But here’s the contact information. Hopefully they will do better than people that have fixed issues in their own and also own many devices that work fine for them.
https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036196372-Get-in-Touch

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Zsolt… I agree with you. I have my fair share of problems. As proven again …”you get what you pay for.” It’s better to invest in a wired security system

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I feel your pain.

I just put mine up today. It can’t detect motion until I’m 5 feet from it.

I went to the support system, to chat with someone. Here is there exact response:

Unfortunately, device troubleshooting and first time setup are temporarily unavailable in Chat.

For self-help content, visit:

support.ring.com

For product news and neighbor message boards, visit:

community.ring.com

That seems like a company that doesn’t really want customers. Now to find the boxes and send this thing back before the return window runs out.

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Hi @RSaunders. Our chat team does have a limited scope at this time and is unable to do device troubleshooting over chat. No worries though, our support team over the phone directly can assist with this. Please give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here. We’re taking additional steps to protect our team and help reduce the spread of COVID-19. This has resulted in longer than normal wait times. If you are outside of the US, please read our response to COVID-19 here to see how to contact support.

Sure, but on the phone I can’t email a video comparing what actually happened to what the Ring saw. People on the phone from some distant call center who are following a script isn’t the same as thoughtful tech support. I’ll give the phone a try, and update this if it changes my mind.

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Got the same exact warning RSaunders. I’ve had the service barely a month, purchased the “Plus” tier a year at a time both for the savings and the 60 days storage. I went whole hog, after seeing how many people in the area are being robbed during the pandemic. I have a wired system that has 3 cameras, CCTV (color/audio) with only local storage capability. It’s been fine up until now, but with all the home breakins going on I wanted extra reassurance. I read up on having to download my videos a few weeks into storing them, so that I did not lose them.

My problem is that everything older than 1 week says “Processing, unable to retreive” OR “This video has been deleted.”

Let me be clear. I have not deleted any videos. Nothing. I was going through them again today to make sure I was caught up, had the important ones downloaded, as my account is now a month old. I have 60 days to download the videos.

Supposedly.

Anything older than about a week to 10 days is gone. I “had” full-face videos of local prowlers that the police are looking for, have posted pictures of, and offered to provide proof that they had indeed been roving through folks back yards. I “had” perfectly clear full body videos of my sisters boyfriend vandalizing a neighbors property and car - more covid related madness. I’m unable to even access them, and am being repeatedly told I must have cleared the alerts for them in my app. Even though that begs the question “Why the heck would you use that method, on a mobile device, to permanently delete stored videos, potentially of crimes?!?!” Aren’t there evidence laws that data/cloud providers have to comply with simply to do business here in the US?

Regardless of how stupid using that method without at least a triple check/warning system in place, and hey how about an undelete, just in case? … I never deleted any videos. I certainly never chose to erase any alerts. This looks like a case of serious hardware failure that is getting blamed/excused by pointing at the customer and saying “We told you it was permanent!”. Simply following some industry “best practices” could simplify your support problems, clear up a lot of customer complaints (I’m betting), AND make it almost impossible for any single full SAN/DAS/NAS failure to completely take out any customers data.

Needless to say, I’m not too happy. I bought 4 cameras, and one of the doorbells. I believe I got the entire package for under $500, and almost immediately signed up for the “Plus” tier so that I would have 60 days total to get those valuable videos downloaded.

All for nothing. Any time I try to access any video older than about a week, I get one of two error messages - “Your video is processing, please try again later”, or “This event’s video has expired or been deleted”.

If things continue in their current state, I feel I’ve wasted good money on a system that does not perform as advertised. Additionally, I’ve paid an extra $100 for a “service” that is essentially worthless. I didn’t even get 2 weeks to download my videos, much less 60 days. I’ve worked in IT, systems/network admin for close to 30 years. I was a developer before and during that. I did not use the “clear alerts” “feature”, so that’s not the source of whatever this issue is, but I can tell you that this is a completely unacceptable way to include this functionality within the application. As soon as I saw the warning, I cringed. Simply seeing that the “feature” is included in the application, and the way it is coded to delete without the possibility of recovering… unacceptable. The fact that it’s included in a shipping version of the application? Worse than unacceptable.

I spent the last several decades reading up on any and all “best practices” that I could find when working as a systems and network admin, and I did the same sort of research when coding. There are simply things that you do not include in a shipping version of the application, unless there are multiple levels of both explanation AND chances to cancel out. Nobody should be given the ability to wipe their entire video recording library for their security system with one command, a swipe. It should be hidden behind a few layers of warnings, some red borders, some flashing lights and sirens.

Better yet, implement a couple of the Microsoft or Amazon Cloud Services/Data Storage, Redundancy and Security Best Practices. Your service will be far more reliable, and capable of handling a simple “Could you restore this for me?” request.

If I had known Ring was going to be this unreliable, I would have been backing up to my (lifetime) 2TB pCloud cloud storage drive, that I picked up on sale for a little over $200. A tad expensive for a hard drive, but one you can reach from anywhere on the net, fully encrypted?

If Ring cannot improve their service and app, I see no reason to recommend it nor use it myself. As it stands, I have slightly over a week of videos to comb through and quickly get them transferred. Since I have been unable to even reach a support person, and was turned instead to the forums, has anyone else ever run into error messages like this? And is Ring so backwards that they truly do not do their own backups, offsite and remote mirroring? There are companies that exist solely to provide these services to corporations, at extremely reasonable rates. Hundreds to thousands of TB, for less than the cost of a 2 person team to handle the task.

It would have been cheaper and more reliable to go CCTV, and upgrade the one I have to something accessable via the internet.

I do have an additional bit of info that may help - I’m hoping that the app is not designed this way… NONE of my videos show any indication that they are in a “processing” state nor that they are deleted. They look exactly like all the recent ones, that I can indeed download. Does this point to (hopefully!) something fixable?

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I’d call customer service. I have 4 indoor cams, 3 outdoor cams and a 2nd gen doorbell pro. I can go back on any of them to 60 days ago and see every event without any issues. You should be able as well. Customer service has different hours of operation depending on where you live due to covid-19.

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I have just one outdoor camera aand for two weeks now I can’t view videos. Tried everything. It is rubbish.

I cannot get help with anything either. Ring has my money since April 20, 2021 but I still don’t have camera with spotlights and can’t get any help from a human.

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Hi neighbors! You can always search for posts about your concerns by using the search feature in the top right-hand corner. You can click the magnifying glass and type in a topic to pull up posts about that topic. This is a great way to find solutions to questions you may have about your Ring devices. Additionally, our support team is always available to help with any questions or concerns as well. You can give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here. We’re taking additional steps to protect our team and help reduce the spread of COVID-19, so this has resulted in longer than normal wait times. If you are outside of the US, please read our response to COVID-19 here to see how to contact support. :slight_smile:

Nothing to do covid i am having very similar issues, now i can suggest a solution that will fix the issue we all experience.
We need to all have local applience dvr to cash the video localy and then sync to the cloud, the direct cloud server is not working well.
Now my app crashes, you need to introduce wp3 for the wifi plus give every device ethernet so we can wire them.
Fire you buisness model designer. Socks.

Ring tech support is pathetic. Spent four days, with the techs trying to prove to them what I already knew…One of my Spotlight cams had shot craps. I dealt with Brett first…it must have been his first day on the job. He was from Tennessee and totally clueless. Then it was Maria’s turn…she was good. did a lot of troubleshooting with me . Told me how to reset my camera and wait till dark to see if the camera and lights worked. She said if it didn’t then she would process a replacement. She sent me an email to respond to after I had a chance to see if it worked at night. Well, that night the camera still didn’t work,. I replied to her email that the problem still existed…The email I responded was returned saying Ring doesn’t handle tech support via email any longer. WONDERFUL. So I called tech support AGAIN this morning and a NEW tech wanted to go through the same troubleshooting that the first two techs went through…I told the tech never mind, I was dumping Ring and all of my devices and transitions to Arlo products. He couldn’t care less. A hell of a way to treat a customer that has been with them since the company started.

Wow. I hate to hear of folks having such problems with Ring. Maybe I was lucky. I’ve only had one or two incidents that really aggravated me and I got enough info and help right here to handle those. And actually wound up not being problems at all.
I have not had to deal with Ring Support directly. I’ve been able to figure out from the help I’ve gotten here to answer all my questions.
One thing that helped me I think. I started my install with the company that has handled my home security system for year and years.
When they recommended Ring I was kind of surprised. I thought they’d fix me up with their equipment. Honeywell I believe. And pay a fee to them.
These guys were honest enough to tell me that this equipment and the Cloud account etc was far superior to anything else they installed including their own stuff.
Also much cheaper. I’m retired and was around when they started installing this stuff and also was studying everything I could online and when they finished the ones I had committed to well I took over myself.
First it was a little cheaper and also I was learning enough to somewhat debug and adjust most everything myself.
If I hit a bump well I asked here. I didn’t always get a direct technical answer but always enough and pointed in the right direction that I fixed things to my liking.
Another thing my security guys did that really helped me. I was told up front that this stuff, their stuff, or anything else out there would not run perfect out of the box because every scenario, location, etc is different.
I also had a little background with IR and Motion anyway. And I knew how buggy some of this can get.
I’m not singing anybody praises I guess I’m saying I really didn’t expect perfection out of the box. Everything actually went pretty well.
We originally started with a five, I believe, camera setup. And after those were installed I did have to have them come back a couple of times. Nothing major. But not acting right.
I will say that after those I was satisfied enough to start adding more myself. I realized I didn’t have near the coverage I needed. In the past 16-18 month or so we’ve been hit like four times. Our sheriffs dept advised cameras and motion lighting. I’m out rural and a far piece off the road. Also the lay of our home simply couldn’t be covered properly with five. It kinda hit me it was pretty crazy to leave so much open and available.
I have wound up right now with I think 13.
And we’ve already ran a couple of perps away with the lights just hitting them.
I had much rather prevent, than have them coming in again sounding these big house alarms. Pretty spooky at 4 in the morning and also knowing the cops won’t be here most of the time for like 45 minutes.
Sad but that’s our situation.
Back to the cameras etc. Yes I’ve had a few that just seemed to attract darn spiders. And Big moths. Webs moving back and forth with the wind. Lol. But I THINK I have those pretty much straightened out. Any time I needed information I asked here. And again maybe I’m lucky but I’ve always been helped to my satisfaction.
All that said. I realize there’s a lot said about equipment with a couple of years on them maybe not acting right. I’m hoping I don’t have that problem but I do realize how electronics such as this especially outdoors can do crazy things. If I start having a bunch of problems I’ll no doubt be upset too. And I need to clarify what the warranty really is while having the Plan with Ring.
I do NOT like the phone being the only method of support. I assume I’m understanding that correctly ??
I would really like other Avenues as My hearing is awful and I can’t hardly carry on a conversation on a telephone these days.
When the day comes I DO need customer support. Well I’m not going to be happy. I can’t even talk with my grandkids on the phone. I will say the lack of other means is ridiculous. Just my opinion.
As of right now I don’t have any complaints. I’ve had issues but have been helped.
I hate so many others are having so many issues.
I’ll toss this in. My biggest obstacles have not actually been the gear. The settings have to be tinkered with. I figured that out. Lol.
The People Only mode has not always been that for me. A big moth at just the right place at the right time will trigger it sometimes. I’m sure they developed that mode around parameters that would be fitting. But I know first hand motion IR reflections and such can cause goofy things. Maybe they should have called it something else ?? LOL!
And WIFi strength I really had to work on. Ive read a lot of problems I have to wonder if the WiFi is strong enough ?
I have the Plume Mesh system. Started with three Super Pods. I’ve had to add three more for a total of six. Located perfectly. I’ve juggled those things In My sleep. Lol.
I found that moving one even two feet. Or even rigging it so it at a slightly different angle can make all the difference. I imagine extenders and repeaters would be the same. Some of my outside cameras are like 38 feet away from an outside wall. It took some juggling to get reliable WiFi to those.
WiFi strength and adjusting motion with every setting available has helped me.
I hate to hear all the complaints about support. Because I know sooner or later it’s gonna be me. I’ve got too much stuff to cruise forever without problems.

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I am surely agreed with j, thank you very much j for sharing such a good thing with us and aware us related to this type of issues.
thank you again

Completely agree and have the same issues with our system

Well, good or bad experiences, I think first of all we should be grateful Ring is hosting this site for all of us. And I am also grateful to our moderators here who I do believe sincerely try to help and in fact have escalated several issues to their team.

At the same time, I share some concerns here expressed about the phone support. Years ago before Ring was owned by Amazon, it was indeed better. You were given a person’s name, contact info and could even email back and forth -even before making a purchase. I believe at that time all support was USA based. After the Amazon acquisition things did deteriorate a bit in my opinion I experienced similar things epxressed here - namely having someone contact me via email as a followup but when you try to reply, there would be a response at first, but then, nothing. Then you had to start all over again with a new agent. It was around that time that I started posting any questions here. There are lots of knowledgeable people here and I, in turn, try to “pay it forward” when I can and help out here and there.

Circling back to emails, I would also like to ask Ring moderators here to please express to their team to bring back the email/ticket system. Many folks don’t have time to spend on the phone and it is quite common with companies selling electronic goods such as these, or any number of products, to have an email/ticket system where you can report your issue, get a response, and take it from there. That way, you also have written documentation to refer back to in the future. I realize this could be requested in the Feature Request forum but thought I would add this in the spirit of this discussion.

Finally, Arkar makes a good point that these devices do require some “experimentation”. There are lots of variables from one house or property to another. I think some experimentation is reasonable given the relatively low cost of these systems. As others have pointed out, there are more expensive systems, installed and monitored by security companies, but there is a price tag for that. One has to decide the pros and cons.

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Thank you for this feedback neighbors. Whether it be with our devices, features, services, or support, we are always working to bring our neighbors the best experience.

Keep in mind, the Ring Community is a public neighbor-to-neighbor forum, in which our support team does not monitor. With that being said, there are plenty of neighbors and Community team members here to offer guidance. Your feedback is always valued, and we do share it with the appropriate teams.

When it comes to certain concerns pertaining to your device, account, or concerns that need a closer look, our support team is best at handling these matters quickly. For further assistance, please give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here. If you are outside of the US, please visit here to see how to contact support.