How do I get PieSync Support - Hubspot bought them, claims they cannot support, PieSync stopped providing support and returning email - but they take my money until end of year. Who am I paying? I’m abandoned and being forcibly upsold to Operations Hub - AND they discontinued Marketo integration - no surprise there, but it still **bleep**.
Hi @JWeldy,
I understand your frustration! Hopefuly I can help a bit as a former PieSync Support rep, and current Operations Hub community manager.
PieSync’s Customer Support indeed does not exist anymore as of July this year. This means the email inbox (support@piesync.com) isn’t actively monitored. This was announced back in November 2020, I believe, when it was also announced that PieSync would be sunset at the end of 2021.
If you’re still being charged then that means you probably still have an active PieSync account. As previously mentioned, PieSync still works 100% until the end of this year. The only difference now is that there’s just no customer support anymore. If you want to stop using PieSync, you can just go to your PieSync Account > Billing > and click ‘cancel account’ at the bottom of the page. Please let me know if you’re have any problems with this step, so I can escalate this.
I understand that this isn’t the most pleasant offboarding/sunset experience, but I want to clarify that you’re not being forcibly upsold to Operations Hub. The choice to move onto Operations Hub is totally yours. We knew that it would take some additional time for Data Sync to get support all of the functionalities that PieSync had, so we wanted to leave the choice with our customers to stay on the PieSync platform until its end, to start using HubSpot’s Data Sync, or to move onto another alternative.
Should you be considering to move to HubSpot, then I want to note that Data Sync start for free. Depending on how you were using PieSync, you can technically move over and pay less than you did before. If you were usingcustom field mappings though, you’ll need to upgrade to Operations Hub Starter, which costs a $50/month flat fee, which as opposed to PieSync billing’s variable (the more contacts, the higher the price) can be considered a bargain.
Will you support my current bidirectional Zoho CRM - Marketo sync?
I didn’t think so.
You say “I understand that this isn’t the most pleasant offboarding/sunset experience.”
Try ‘worst ever’.
And the assumption that the acquiring company will provide support for their sunsetted product is not unusual, is it?
Yeah, you supported PieSync when you were selling it (2019) - before you had the new hub.
So, the idea that you’re NOT trying to force a move by refusing to support? That you’re NOT trying to move me from my current integration, my current marketing solution and my current CRM?
Yeah.
Will you support my current bidirectional Zoho CRM - Marketo sync?
Hey, @jbogaert . Hubspot’s silence is not unexpected, but still disappointing. My new management wanted to switch to your platform next year, when our Zoho/Marketo subscriptions expire.
So, this lack of response is a concern, both for now and for future plans.
Hi @jbogaert,
We are having the same problems as @JWeldy.
We’re long term customers of PieSync and are very happy with the service offering when it works.
However, since PieSync was taken over we’ve had zero support from either PieSync (who no longer monitor their inbox) or from HubSpot. This means there is no way to get help when there are system outages. We don’t even have an email address to contact.
There was a major issue with PieSync back in late June and it was weeks before anyone resolved it. Because no one responded from support we had to relentlessly badger sales teams and Social Media, on an almost daily basis, before someone finally took action.
During this time we had to spend countless hours manually processing tasks because PieSync had stopped synching contacts.
In our case we would be totally happy to move everything over to Operations Hub and have asked repeatedly when the same synchronisations that we currently have with running PieSync will be available and when our account can transferred.
All we’ve been told, again after weeks of badgering, is that there are “more features coming within the coming months, the expectation would be to move you to the Operations hub by the end of the year.”
As a business we need to plan ahead and have someone we can contact when something goes wrong with the service (which we are all paying for after all).
Please could I make a request:
- Please could you allocate your PieSync customers with a paid Hubspot account (equivalent to what they are paying on their PieSync bill each month). That way we would presumably have access to direct support and an account manager should we need help in the future
- Please could you work with your PieSync clients to replicate the synchronisations that they have running on your Operations Hub so that we have the option to move over to HubSpot (for customers that wish to). Currently there are a number of syncs which are on PieSync but not on Operations Hub which makes moving over impossible
I would really appreciate if you can help your customers in this regard as it does feel like we’ve slipped through the nets.
Best Regards
Tommy
Hi @jbogaert
Would it be possible to get a response from yourself (or someone on the HubSpot Operations Hub team) on my post above?
Best Regards
Tommy
Hey - @jbogaert pointed me to this thread where I want to address the questions raised by @Canonbury but before I do, I can’t stress enough how truly sorry I feel that we’re even having to do this. In hindsight, it should have been something we made more clear months ago.
We actually have refreshed communications lined up, ready to go out to our impacted user base.
- Please could you allocate your PieSync customers with a paid Hubspot account
We will not do this. While they share the same technical architecture, PieSync and data sync are de facto separate products. When we communicated in November 2020 to stop customer support for PieSync, it was precisely because we wanted to dedicate more resources to developing data sync exclusively inside of HubSpot. Customers with an Operations Hub Starter account do get customer support.
- …So that we have the option to move over to HubSpot…
Regretfully, we cannot guarantee that all PieSync users will be able to move to data sync because of two reasons: (1) We will not have all 250+ apps PieSync supported, (2) nor will we reach feature parity.
As for (1), we’re at almost 70 apps now which, given the fact that some apps were more popular than others, actually solves for the vast majority of PieSync users. We still plan on adding many more apps this year by the way.
As for (2), and I know this doesn’t fully apply to you - or you wouldn’t be in this thread - but we do know we made the right choices in the product so far. Most of our users have been able to move over and we’re serving a multiple of the number of users PieSync ever had. We’re doing that, in a mostly free product, or in many cases cheaper than PieSync. However, this still leaves users with the niche use cases (or niche apps): they will likely not yet be able to move over before PieSync sunsets.
In fact, “feature parity” is in fact not the right term to employ given the vast fundamental differences between the two products Data Sync and PieSync. It’s better to phrase it as “use case parity”.
PieSync evolved from a simple sync app back in the day to a rule engine giving you quite some flexibility, to a degree that it could also corrupt an entire database when used in improper fashion. As such, it was a conscious design choice not to pursue this approach in Data Sync, and instead to keep it to a simple interface (for the time being).
That’s why replicating any PieSync setup with data sync will not always be possible, neither now not in the future. For instance, on the one hand, we’ll improve the mappings so that it becomes possible to map certain fields/dropdowns/owners - not possible today - but on the other hand this also means we don’t plan to add the same IF/THEN rules (like PieSync had) in the near term. As for alternatives: we’d argue an app like Zapier or Integromat can apply those transformations too, even running alongside a data sync. Specific actions such as adding a contact to a list, adding or removing a tag to a contact, … those are mostly perfectly executable in an app like Zapier with a data sync running on the backend of it. Data sync can make sure the data and fields are kept in sync, with Zapier applying some transformations that go beyond field mapping.
TL;DR While we still hope to reach use case parity before EOY, we need to transparently acknowledge that we cannot guarantee even that. If we did a bad job communicating this pending reality: you’re very right. But hopefully this clears up a lot of things and makes it easier to plan ahead.