I used to love Tier scoots. They drove better than others in my city. For example Voi scoots had uneven acceleration and steering, trying to veer a bit too much left or right all the time. Those are safety issues, and Tier was doing better on all fronts. The physical part of their service, including calibration and maintenance, is much better than e.g. Voi.
However, almost all of that changed about two years ago. Their physical maintenance is still great, so steering works better. Everything else has gone way downhill.
TL;DR:
- Their GPS-based features misbehave constantly
- Ride speeds go down semi-randomly, losing you time
- This is also safety-critical (it can happen when you’re in front of another vehicle, including a car)
- GPS failures delay/prevent you from returning your scoot
- They keep charging you for longer when scoot returning fails due to their GPS failure. They don’t even auto-retry
- Contacting their customer support has you go through minutes of arbitrary delays
- Customer support requires you to spend yet more minutes to write your issue in detail before doing their job (despite having all the info already in their app analytics)
- All of this renders the core service useless (their value proposition is to save you a few minutes, yet you often end up losing way more time than you wanted to save)
- They use deceptive practices to trick you into paying more
Their ride speeds fail constantly
It started from them introducing GPS-based tracking of where you’re driving, and using it for controlling your speed. It used to not be an issue at all, but depending on where you’re driving, this misbehaves all the time. I had routinely Tier drop my speed from 20km/h to 10km/h several times during a 5-minute or 10-minute trip.
This is unacceptable to happen regularly. Scoots are a service that people use to save two or three minutes here and there. You take a scoot and drive a bit longer way around on bike lanes instead of walking the shortest possible way, but end up saving some time because the scoot goes triple as fast as you walk… when it works. When it slows down to walking speed, but you’re still going the longer way around, you end up losing time, or at best, breaking even.
Tier, like other similar services, keeps a log of everyone’s trips, speeds and GPS locations. It’s easy for them to track where their service is routinely failing and slowing speeds down when a person driving straight on a bike path, where the full speed should be guaranteed all the time. They have all the data they need to spot where their GPS-based software is consistently failing customer. They do not have an excuse for not fixing these in years, especially as myself and many others have complained to them and pointed the specific spots where these fail. It is only through bad management that they constantly ignore the customer experience, how they under-deliver on their supposed savings on time.
Ride speed failures are a safety issue
It’s not just that Tier’s constant software failures waste customer time, making the service pointless every time this happens. It is an outright safety issue. I’ve lost the track of how many times it happened at a crossing point with other scoots and bikes coming at you, or even a car.
First you’re going at a certain speed, and you and every can predict where will you be in a few seconds’ time, so everyone avoids collisions. Then your speed slows down to half unexpectedly. You’re not prepared for that, and neither is that other bike, scoot, or a car.
You would NEVER use your brakes at that point, crossing others in traffic. But Tier will use your brakes for you, randomly.
Tier software development team has decided to be completely irresponsible about how they use their GPS-based features. They use those, making safety-critical decisions automatically, without any concern of the problems they cause. It seems like they slapped a GPS feature on their software, got it barely working most of the time, and called it a day. No matter how many customers have complained to them about it for all these years, they’ve done ZERO development on these. They’re just happy to keep charging users fraudulently extra minutes here and there thanks to this (more on this below).
The last time
The last time I used them, I couldn’t get a scoot unlocked. Tier kept the ”Trying to unlock” view open for a long time, without allowing me to interrupt it. It took perhaps a minute, and then they told they couldn’t unlock the scoot. Assuming it was a temporary technical issue, I tried again, twice. On either of these three attempts Tier stopped responding to any user input. I couldn’t cancel it, just wait for it to run the full minute or so until failing. I tried one more time for about the fourth time, wasting about five minutes because of this Tier software failure. The fourth time I didn’t wait the full minute to see it fail as it did each time, I put my phone in my pocket and started walking towards where I wanted to go. I had wanted to save five minutes with Tier, and they had stolen five minutes from me instead.
After five minutes of walking – which Tier was supposed to save me – I arrive at the next scoot stop. There is a free Tier scoot, so I take my phone out to see if I can open this one and at least take the rest of the with a scoot. I find that this time Tier has opened that one scoot, and has been charging me for many minutes, even though the scoot has not moved an inch. It’s just staying stationary, they are invoicing me, and I have to stop it to be able to take the next scoot.
Reaching customer support is hell
I write their customer support. Unfortunately I already know what I’m in for. It is a completely inappropriate process. For some other kind of service, this could be barely tolerable, but this is absolutely inappropriate for a service that people use to save small amounts of time.
I only reach out to Tier support when I was paying it to save me two minutes but it lost me three. Then it takes another three minutes to reach the customer support, to be able to write a single line. I’ve complained of all of these issues to Tier multiple times, asking them to improve these, because these are absolutely ridiculous in this context. However, Tier has done absolutely nothing on any of these at any point. It feels like a bank from the 1800s, completely set on its ways to not improve customer experience at all in what it comes to software management. And all their customer interactions happen through software.
The worst thing about reaching customer support is having to go through a chatbot that ALWAYS takes half a minute to answer. It already knows exactly what are the next options to present, but unlike any other software, they wanted to make going to these menus slow.
Reaching Tier support goes like this:
- Open the menu
- Tap Help and Safety
- Tap Help center
- Tap Send us a message
- Choose from 8 options
- Wait 30 seconds until the next options are shown
- Choose from the options
- Wait 30 seconds until the next options are shown
- Choose from the options
- Wait 30 seconds until the next options are shown
- Depending on what you chose, they close the ”chat” immediately and you have to restart
- Finally you’ll get to choose to write to a human
Let’s take a tally:
– You paid them to save you two minutes
– Their software problem (speed, unlocking, locking) lost you three minutes
– In order to even request a refund, you have to waste three more minutes in their menus
The last couple of times I just wrote them the word Refund at this point. I wanted back the money I paid for to save two minutes but ended losing me six. They have all the data of the software available. They can see whether the ride had slowdown problems. They can see if I tried to unlock many times, and then it finally went through, but the scoot moved nowhere (because I had already left), and was in a few minutes at their next scoot stand, trying to unlock a new one and went through their menu hell to write the word Refund.
But no, they don’t refund anything unless you spend more minutes writing to them what exactly was the problem. They already know it, they could build automatic analytics to identify these software problems, fix them and refund automatically. But instead they don’t do anything about their software, it keeps failing you, when you want to reach customer support it’s another hell (losing you more time than you were using them to save), and when you finally reach an agent they can’t be bothered to do their job without you spelling it out to you.
The customer service is always kind and very effective when you explain the case to them. However, it is absolutely unacceptable to have the customer spend ten minutes in total to get a refund for three minutes that you wasted them.
Deceptive practices
Tier engages in a number of deceptive practices in their software. I’m going to keep this section very short, but they word things in a purposefully misleading way.
Ending a subscription
If you take a Tier pass, they always make it an ongoing subscription. When you stop it from renewing, they try to scare you off from doing so, spelling things in a way that sounds like you’re going to lose what you already paid for: ”Are you really sure you want to lose benefits?”
When you choose OK, you’ll get to use your paid period until the end, as supposed. But every time anyone tries to do that, they’re trying to scare that person off by acting like they’ll lose what the already paid for.
Ending a ride
Another issue is that when you end a ride, their buggy-as-hell GPS software often says that ”You’re in a no parking area”. Maybe you had your phone in your pocket while riding, and just opened it to end the ride, and it didn’t update its GPS location yet. But this happens often also when you’ve placed your phone in the very convenient wireless charging station Tier has (I wished all scoots had this), and the screen was open, showing you your location all the time. Perhaps the location you arrived to is between some tall buildings, but it’s not even necessary. Tier GPS software fails me in this way every second time I use them, regardless of when and where.
What happens is that Tier just gives you the error message, and keeps running your minutes. It doesn’t even auto-retry, and they definitely don’t put your ride on pause as soon as you try to end it. If you tried to end your ride at 6m50s of riding time, and succeed, they’ll charge you for 7 minutes. But if they manage to keep the time running so that your ride time becomes 7m00s or more, they’ll charge you for 8 minutes. Every single time.
I’ve lost count how many times Tier cheated me out of a minute this way. Rough guess is that they’ve stolen about 10 minutes from my Tier subscription every summer month I’ve used them.
You maybe guessed what happened one of the last times I’ve used Tier. I was almost late from somewhere (that’s why I used Tier to save me a few minutes for a few euros). Unlocking didn’t work despite my scoot being in the middle of a scoot parking spot. I tried and retried it five times, for over a minute, in which case they charged me for two minutes extra.
In the end I only got them to end the ride by using their stupid, slow chatbot, and selecting that my problem was about Current ride and about Ending it. They immediately ended the ride (finally) and ended the support chat. I had to open another one, choose different options (my previous rides), choose the specific ride (well, guess, they tell you some code numbers like TIER-123456789 instead of ride date, time and length, e.g. ”Today, two minutes ago, a five-minute ride”), and then go through the rest of the menus to be able to write to the customer service to Refund.
And when I finally got to computer after the meeting, I had a message from Tier support in my email, stating first ”Could you please elaborate?” and then ”We haven’t heard from you in 30 minutes so we’re closing this support chat.”
Again, they had all the information available to sort this all out. They should have automatic analytics to figure all this out, refund errors when they happen, and then fix their software to avoid these errors. Instead of doing any of that, when they see a customer asking to refund a ride that they had trouble ending and was overcharged, losing them valuable minutes that they were using Tier to save, they demand a longer explanation before they’ll bother even looking at the case. They’ll happily pocket those extra two minutes their software bug stole from you, and let you keep the loss of what you paid and the time you lost.
Only if you spend 10 minutes to reach their customer support and explain what exactly went wrong, will they occasionally refund a few of those minutes.
Lesser issues
One of the smaller, still significant issue with them is that the ride pause feature does nothing. The point of the ride pause feature is that you can prevent anyone else from taking your scoot, while you’re still paying for it per minute.
The crucial use case is when you’re in a place where you can’t end the ride there. That’s almost the only time one would use this feature.
For example, imagine you live in city center, where you’re only allowed to completely end your ride at specific spots. You can stop and stand on almost any spot, including by your home building, but you can’t leave your scoot there long term. Let’s say you were out in the city and wanted to visit home quickly on your way somewhere.
What you want to do is ride home, park the scoot outside for a few minutes, and put it on pause, so no one else takes it for free and rides at your expense. You just want to lock it so no one else can use it, you’re still paying it by the minute, and that’s fine because your stay is going to be short.
What Tier says here, unexplicably, is ”cannot pause a ride on a no-parking zone”. This makes absolutely no sense. If I was at a parking zone, I’d end the ride, not pause it.
So Tier leaves you with two options. First is that you leave the scoot in a designated parking spot, walk home, walk back to designated parking spot, and take the scoot again. Or you ride to your building and either leave the scoot there unlocked (maybe inside the locked front door), or take it all the way home. This is a ridiculous set of options to have, when it should absolutely be allowed to pause the ride virtually anywhere. You’d still be on the hook if you chose a ridiculously bad spot, but the software shouldn’t prevent from pausing everywhere in the city center.
Summary
Tier used to be a great company. They provided a service that works well, both the physical and software components.
Nowadays they’re a very bad company from a user experience perspective. Their software keeps failing, especially the GPS-related parts. Because of these, they recharge too much, provide slower and unpredictable ride speeds that make the service much worse (their core selling point is time savings) and risk human lives (the feeling when you’re driving in front of a car and your scoot starts to slow down on its own).
To top it all off, when you want to at least have a refund when they wasted your time due to their software errors, they require you to double that time loss, having to battle their chatbot with its arbitrary delays before you can talk to a human. And then that human will ask you to explain what they can see from their analytics, and what they should have refunded to you automatically.
As much as I used to love them, and I appreciate all the excellent work people do in their physical operations, their software renders their service useless. A time-saving service that wastes your time and risks your life is just not worth using – until they fix their software.
Future
Hopefully this writing helps at least some company, somewhere, remember to see these things from a user perspective. There’s no reason otherwise good companies should kneecap themselves with critically bad software decisions, like all of the above. Most importantly, every company should have a strong mechanism for feedback, given to customer service, to lead to product improvements.
The lack of software development is especially hard to understand because Tier software affects every user, so every improvement could have an outsize effect on customer satisfaction and growth through word-of-mouth. They spend a commendable effort on maintaining each scoot physically and it shows, but they’ve completely neglected software.
I used to recommend Tier to everyone I knew. I stopped recommending them 2-3 years ago. Given the severity of the problems, I certainly wasn’t the only one. Now I’m recommending trying almost anything else first.
Maybe not Voi – steering is even more safety-critical than uneven speeds – but I’m hoping there’s a scoot company that actually wants to provide a good overall service. Not just good hardware with bad software (Tier) or good software with bad hardware (Voi).