EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.
In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.
Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”
“influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve”
Corporate speakers should be paddled
Sounds like a great way to increase their adoption of a competitor’s product
They have paid good money to lawmakers to make sure that brother is never widely adopted.
Translation: “We’ve had our fill of screwing you around for today and invite you to cordially go screw yourself.”
When it comes to HP, just say no.
While hilarious, that’s more than a year old…
Well shit. I saw it on hacker news and thought it was recent.
My bad for not paying attention.
To be fair, if you got on hold with HP support on the day the article was published, you’d still be onhold today.
It was on hold until now to encourage self discovery or sth
I’m just glad we didn’t have to hold the line for a year to read this.
I did tier 1, 2, and eventually some 3 support back in the day for a software company. I liked how they handled it.
Customer called in, reached a live person doing intake. The intake person noted their question and callback number, helping to scope the problem if needed, and entered a ticket into the queue. The intake person gave the caller an expected wait time for a support tech to call back, pointed them to online written help documentation, and ended the call. Then push the ticket to tier 1, 2, 3, or “urgent, need to call NOW” queues. Depending on tier and call volume and time of day, they’d get a callback from a tech anywhere from immediately to the next morning.
Support techs like myself were coached to help over the phone, but also to point out the written materials and encourage their use. I would commonly say, “sure, that’s a problem we can fix, go ahead and go to screen x, click on button y, etc. By the way, you’re not the only one who had had this question, we even have an entry on this in our support documentation. Let me show you where you it’s at so you can get to the fix even faster than a phone call next time”.
Having the intake person take numbers, then techs call back later saved customers from having to wait on hold for lengths of time. We had very few cases of irate customers stuck waiting.
My shittiest experiences are the companies that don’t do any intake and make all tiers of calls wait on hold in the same queue. Luck of the draw if the tech you end up with is a tier 1 still in training pants or a tier 3 pissed to be walking a customer thru updating their password for the millionth tim.
I feel like a lot of companies don’t do things the good way not because the good way is hard, or the bad way is cheaper, but because management is stupid. Stupid or sometimes apathetic.
It’s both, because reducing the number of people and the options they have available to work the system is both usually cheaper to operate and it makes key performance indicators that their bosses have set go up.
The latter is where the stupid comes in and is usually more insidious because everyone always forgets that when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be an effective metric. The end result is a rats-nest of perverse incentives and compliance theatre. But the c-level bosses don’t care because arbitrary numbers went up.
This is precisely what happened at both of my call center jobs. Started out great, with new employees getting a month of training before talking with a customer, but rapidly accepting as many customers as are willing to call in.
Then when they started to fall behind on support from the extra workload, they just outsourced it to a third party and didn’t teach them jack. KPI Number go up, but every customer I talked to recognized the significant drop in quality.
This sounds very humane and reasonable.
HP is one of those companies whose products you can easily avoid. I don’t understand their dominance in the printer market, or why people continue to buy their products when many of them are objectively poor. I also don’t recall a time when HP had a particularly strong reputation to begin with.
At this point, most competitors offer better alternatives than HP.
No, their laptops were pretty good about 10-12 years ago. Mac guy, but Macs weren’t great in the Intel era. I was advised to get an HP laptop. The one I was looking at was very highly rated. Can’t remember the name. Bought one from Asus with better specs. I would have been fine with the HP.
We used to have Elite Desks at work and they are dogshit. I kinda want one though. 8th Gen i5 with 8GB RAM. I wanna toss the hard drive and put an SSD in it. Then put Steam OS on it. I bet it would be decent for 2000s PC gaming. Like up to Skyrim.
Current gen omnibooks are really good if you can ignore or cover the AI branding. They’re also a really good value especially with how often they’re on sale. Source: I bought one a year ago and it’s been very good.
Yeah, I think most new PCs are also Copilot PCs with the branding and the button, if that’s what you mean. I don’t really mind that. I only use Windows at work, and we can’t use Copilot because it requires a personal Microslop account now, and we’re not allowed to sign in with one (only the corporate Intranet account). I think some people do anyway; to me, it’s as bad as using Facebook/whatever social at work, because IT can see everything you do. And I have enough history with Microslop (Xbox as well) I don’t want to associate with my job. I leave my job at the door when I leave and I leave my personal/social life at the door when I go there.
There are better printers than HP, but they have a solid niche where they’re the least expensive enterprise printers that aren’t entirely garbage.
Least expensive until you have to buy ink or toner.
Not necessarily. Epson has good support in the enterprise area, but their toner is just as bad as HP’s. And don’t even get me started on Lexmark.
Again, their home stuff is a different story. But once you cross over into “lol business” things change.
Nobody hates their customers like HP hates their customers.
the worst of it is, HP used to be fucking legit. their scopes and other tools were rock fucking solid for decades. then, came the 80s and 90s.
Having run a couple support teams, I get where they’re coming from with the wait time.
Every minute my team wasn’t spending helping customers was spent updating the knowledge base. We invested a ton of effort into it, and 90% of the tickets were answerable in the first interaction with a simple search.
But getting people to actually read the docs was impossible. And maybe if we made them wait they’d get frustrated
But that’s not very nice to your customers or the agents.
How could you tell that people were not reading the knowledge base? They probably didn’t need to call if they did, so maybe you reduced the volume by 50%. I get what you are trying to say, but if they make me wait 15 minutes just because, I’m going to be pissed once I reach someone. Then the person who doesn’t deserve my bad temper will feel it and I will never buy hardware from you again.
And I’m saying that despite having worked at customer support for years, writing knowledge-base entries and developing the system we used to store it.
Thankfully we didn’t take phone calls. And I knew they weren’t reading the KB because we’d reply with a link to the KB and they’d be happy.
Yes, but I mean how do you know people didn’t read it.
But getting people to actually read the docs was impossible. And maybe if we made them wait they’d get frustrated
You probably didn’t see the ones reading into it, just the ones that didn’t.
The only time the KB really saved was being able to send them a link to the docs that they should have been able to find instead of retyping the response. Which is good because time to first response kept going down as we wrote more articles.
All of the answers were right there and they didn’t see it. And no matter how many articles we added the volume of tickets resolved on the first reply with a KB article didn’t go down. (I know because I tracked this as a KPI for a while until it became obvious it wasn’t budging.)
My only conclusion from this is that there is a segment of people who will always ask someone for help rather than take initiative.
When I started at one company I put together a text file with all the different sources of info I found in training. By the end of training I had turned it into an HTML file. Years later we got bought out. Support from corporate disappeared on legacy customs who hadn’t moved over to new stuff.
A coworker tapped me on the shoulder “If I were to make a local network web server on one of these computers could I upload your help system to it for everyone to use?”
Next thing you know I’m the default source for all information on every system that has ever existed. Prior to that everyone knew that I had it all in my brain but only a handful of people knew that I also had it all in HTML.
TL;DR I built a pirate help desk knowledge base.
I’m currently struggling with a product that I’d love to use the knowledge base for help but they keep changing their goddamn gui every version so the knowledge base docs never apply to me. “Click on files->database->security”, uhhh, there is no “security” under “database” you mother f’ers…
I can guarantee making them wait won’t make them read if that wasn’t their first choice to begin with. All you’re doing is making them angrier for when they finally do get connected to a person.
My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word
At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load
HP support sucks. They wanted me to buy a support package to get a link to a driver. Like, fuck off.
Fuck these companies that refuse to provide customer support and try to force us on inadequate bullshit llm answers, if I didn’t want a solution I would use them.
One of the first things I do now before buying off a new site is see if they have anything resembling customer service and support policies.
It’s like a CEO heard a joke or saw a comic where this happened and thought it was the best idea possible. “If we add in waiting time for no reason then some of the people will hang up and go away.” It’s the same logic as making anyone who wants to close an account (such as Netflix) jump through 3 people and a million hoops.
Seriously, I moved to a town where Comcast has no Internet service, I looked it up on their online service tool. They STILL ran me through retention even after they looked it up and confirmed it internally, and I had to go through 10 extra minutes of some lady reading from a script before they’d kill my account, and then had the gall to ask if I wanted to complete a customer service survey.
Tell Comcast youre going to prison and wont be able to pay for their service
I’ll remember that for next time.
Especially if you are planning to.
HP is a garbage company. My laptops typically last until the hardware is well past obsolete, but not HP’s crap. My HP X360 laptop’s motherboard failed completely and the hinges just fell apart for the 2nd time. This POS didn’t last for 3 years of occasional use. Never again.
HP stands for “Hinge Problems”.
Years ago I called them to get an RMA on a scanner that had a fingerprint on the INSIDE side of the glass. They wanted me to disassemble it and charge me $70 for the knowledge on how to do so. Fuck HP.
Their sales reps that hang out at Microcenter would actually not stop talking to me. I literally walked past them and wouldn’t make eye contact. They followed me through the whole section. It wasn’t until I approached an actual MC employee and said, “I will never buy an HP product. Can you help me?” The HP guy still followed us while I bought another printer! Fuck HP.
It’s never “high call volume”. It’s always “not enough customer service representatives”.
yeah and when its every time when you have called and different days and times its not “unusally high”. the message should be. since we have a policy of not hiring enough customer service representatives you wait time will be artificially high.
We value your call. Unfortunately we don’t value our employees so we are experiencing a limited amount of agents to take your call because we don’t pay them enough. We thank you for your patience while our slaves work hard to deal with your frustrations with our enshitification of our products. They have nothing to do with it but we know how much our company has pissed you off. Your call will be received in the order it was received. Your current wait time is… SEVENTY. FIVE. MINUTES. We appreciate you as a customer.
High call volume is any amount greater than zero.
capitalism is never about the product
CAPITALism. It’s kind of right there in the name. Quite on the nose, I might add.
Im so glad a company finally admitted that the “we’re experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume” was just bullshit.
Yeah, my current ISP has two choices on phone: 1 for contract stuff, 2 for technical support. 1 always has at least 5 minutes waiting time, while 2 usually has none. Choices were made.
