As much as I hate when companies charge you for tech support and then try to crowdsource it so their customers do it for them, I am at my wits end so hoping someone here can help me. I have been going back and forth with tech support for a week and I’ve gotten worse than nowhere.
For context, I pay for the Zapier plan where I get email tech support and a 2-minute polling interval.
This issue concerns what I would think is a pretty simple zap set up. First, outside of Zapier, Typeform quiz results get sent to Google sheets. There is a linked sheet that calculates a result for the quiz.
The zap is supposed to be triggered when there is a new or updated row in the calculator sheet. It filters the result, then updates or adds the subscriber to Mailerlite in a specific group. As there are four possible results to the quiz and four separate groups to be added to, I created four separate zaps.
At first it worked, but I was getting like a half an hour delay between the sheet updating and the subscriber being sent to Mailerlite. I could see the zap was running very infrequently. Then the delay got even longer. Sometimes like three hours.
I contacted tech support and after getting a boiler plate response from someone who clearly didn’t bother to read my email (Hi! here’s a link to the page on polling intervals!), I finally extracted the info that the ‘instant trigger’ tag on the google sheets integration actually means the exact opposite. There is a KNOWN BUG where google sheets will fail to send the info that a sheet is updated. So Zapier set up a backup where they check with google sheets EVERY TWO HOURS. How’s that for ‘instant’?!? (Considering the popularity of sheets on Zapier this seems insane to me.)
And because this error is on the google sheets side, Zapier seems to think this means they don’t have to provide the 2-minute polling interval (despite the fact that I am paying them, not google, and they tout this as an ‘instant’ trigger.)
The only fix I was offered, besides wait for the bug to be addressed someday, was to move my sheets to a shared drive (they called it a Team Drive, which I eventually figured out no longer exists and was renamed), which would allow me to use a non-instant trigger, which would then give me my 2-minute polling interval.
I was so desperate to stop throwing time down this stupid Zapier black hole that I shelled out £300 to upgrade my google workspace, which as a solopreneur I did not need for any other reason, and went to the trouble to move everything and create the new zaps.
IT’S STILL TAKING OVER AN HOUR between the time the sheet is updated with a new entry and a subscriber is sent to mailerlite.
So now I have a quiz I cannot use because it frustrates people rather than engaging them, hours and hours of lost time to trying to fix this problem with the useless tech support, and I’m out £300 for a ‘fix’ that did nothing.
I do not understand how Zapier thinks it is OK to charge for a polling interval they do not provide, to use language like ‘instant’ for something that they know is slower than their slowest guaranteed interval, and to offer fixes that cost HUNDREDS of pounds and DO NOT WORK.
If anyone has any suggestions besides trying to find a better company to work with, I’d love to hear it.
