The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.

I worked HP CS in Highschool and during my time there I created a HTML/JS replacement for a unbearably slow tree system that made a 10+ second network call every single question(often 20+ questions and a tree copy was required for notes). Mine was instant.

They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.

At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.

What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.

They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.

Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.

I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not providing it if the product is problem-free for 99% of your users.

Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.

There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.

But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.

Someone presumably pitched this idea within HP and other people agreed it was something they should try. I guess probably HP didn't put its best and brightest in charge of call centres but still, isn't that sort of amazing?

I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.

Marginally related:

I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions)

I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either need to wait till the next day, or bring it early in the day so that it can be done by the end of the same day.

That store somehow is closed for half of the year for no reason. The next closest store is about 20 minutes of drive away, with the same thing -- arrive early or wait overnight.

Meanwhile, these repairs are straightforward repairs at genius bar that can be done within about an hour, any time of the year.

I had similar experience with laptop repairs. Apple and Intel (NUC lines) were top tier, and I was able to get back my device quickly. Not so for other manufacturers.

Apple devices come with a premium price, but as my life gets more complex, I realize that my time is worth more than the money I save on the hardware.

In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.

At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.

Just further cements HP's position as one of the most anti-consumer multi-national companies in existence.

American companies seem to increasingly hate their own customers. Add random fees, make products worse and provide terrible support. In a functioning market small competitors would take away the business of the big players but with the lack of monopoly enforcement they just buy their competition. Not sure where this is leading but it's not a good trend.

> Some HP workers were reportedly unhappy with the mandatory hold times, with an anonymous “insider” in HP’s European operations reportedly telling The Register, per its Thursday report: “Many within HP are pretty unhappy [about] the measures being taken and the fact those making decisions don’t have to deal with the customers who their decisions impact.”

Sounds to me like some customers who did get through after the 15 minutes then complained about the wait times to workers, which means the workers had to lie about the cause.

"Best available laptop support" apparently means 18/30 or 12/20.

Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.

>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.”

>Even if HP’s telephone support center wasn’t busy, callers would reportedly hear: We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.

i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. my isp does the exact same thing with basically the same wording. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing high call volumes right now. but hey, did you know you can do lots of stuff on the website? go to the website. please use the website".

i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.

I have to admit i solve some support cases similarly. If I get questions about what seems to be a trivial thing I tend to wait a while with responding because most of the time it solves itself or the user discovered the plug was unplugged.

To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing

My first thought was "wow, those assholes."

But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?

I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them. People want their problem fixed as quickly as possible, no-one wants to call a call centre.

What if I told you that customer support is a marketing expense?

“improve customer tech support”

That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.

There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)

> and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative

But you don't have those as a real alternative! Yes, you do have some "digital", but it's of the same awful quality as this mandatory 15min rule.

I am so frustrated that every company in the world seems to treat user support as a tax that they must must MUST eliminate at all costs.

Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away.

Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it.

But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?

I'm mostly a libertarian, but claiming "we are experiencing higher than normal call volumes" when you aren't should put you in jail for fraud.

I'm sure HP is bad but look at Nvidia's support forums. Most questions go unresolved but the close it after 14 days of inactivity and mark it resolved.

my parking space company has a variant that if you call in, you can choose to be called back at a later point.

what they don't tell you is that they will call you back after 4pm.

you don't keep your place in the queue. the first time around i expected to be called back within an hour, and ended up expecting a call "any minute now" the whole day.

I have a Ford EV and a local Ford dealer refused to do warranty work on it because I didn't buy it there.

(2025)

I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead episode Tech Support. Why the hell would those two dolts be allowed anywhere near a headset they picked up?

"See, Hamid: our goal is to help the customers - of course - but if we're on the phone too long, we don't make any money. We go out of business - and then what will the customers do?"

Do HP and Boeing recruit from the same candidate pools/train using the same employee manuals???

I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.

> We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience.

What a joke.

Anyway most of us already know to steer well clear of anything HP branded. It’s not the HP we remember from years past. Their junk is unreliable and they apparently have no interest in customer support.

I also love it when I spent ten minutes trying to locate the customer support line number (that is usually well hidden) for a recorded voice message reminding me that they have a website with the most generic answers to the most generic problems which I don’t have right now. Do you really think I’d be wasting my time going through your idiotic customer service number if I had found your generic answer in the FAQ helpful?

There is a special place in hell for the MBAs imagining new ways to maw everyone’s lives miserable.

Reminds me of this Norway govt ad about the job of an enshittifier: https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

In the long run, your customer's best interest aligns with your own best interest. Unless customer support costs were going to bankrupt HP, I think causing customers pain can only harm them.

It is technically possible for mandatory 15 minute support call wait times to increase total user happiness by lowering average wait time in the queue.

My god this is comic book villain level of business behaviour. Honestly whoever comes up with these decisions needs an exorcism.

Won't this just cause more issues with customer server agents. Like I would assume more people would be annoyed once they get an agent.

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This is something most callcenter software has had since forever. It's about expectation management (usually the feature is named somewhere along those lines too), making the customer wait when it's quiet tends to make them less pissed when they have to wait at busy times. And also to differentiate paid support tiers.

I have not however seen it used structurally as a disincentive to calling for support. I mean it has that effect obviously but in the cases where it was implemented I have not seen that be the actual goal. That's a different level of nasty again.

As a former callcenter consultant, it was usually the bad companies that didn't care about their customers that wanted this implemented. The good ones just wanted the best they could offer and considered a 15 minute wait (even when it was simply due to high call volumes) a massive fail and an immediate need to upscale the team. As it should be. The biggest issue is often customers calling during lunch time when many agents themselves are out to lunch too. This can often be mitigated with good shifting and follow the sun support.

Ps this is completely bullshit:

> 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.”

The reason they want customers to self serve is not because it's faster. It's because it's wildly cheaper.

The cheapest support interaction is a customer self reading the documentation/kbase. Then come the AI agents, then chat with a real agent. Then far on top in terms of cost is a live call with an agent. This is because chat agents can and do handle multiple chats at the same time and often have the benefit of premade answer snippets. A live agent doesn't have any of that.

However if the customer decides they want to speak to an agent it's definitely impacting their satisfaction trying to steer them elsewhere. The "it's faster" reasoning is just spin on what is essentially just poor bottom of the barrel customer service.

> 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.

Won’t be true for everyone, but if I’m ringing, it’s because the digital self-solve solution didn’t work. Which happens ridiculously often.

Right now, I’m struggling with working out how to return a laptop keyboard¹ on Amazon (India). They say you can return it, but when you try, it only offers you a “chat now” button², and the bot eventually reveals it can only help with troubleshooting, and suggests you try other options, and here’s how you can escalate to a human, and… they’re both just a link back to the start of the support system, which no longer mentions any phone number or other way of contacting a human.

And this is hardly abnormal. So many self-serve systems are just broken, and it feels to me like it’s happening increasingly often.

—⁂—

¹ For an ASUS GA503QM. Among other issues, Space/f/j activate well past the click, Space doesn’t activate at all if pressed at the ends, and it’s 2KRO with horrific ghosting—typing “you” will activate F11 most of the time, “he ” gets a spurious N, and mashing the keyboard will put the laptop to sleep (which doesn’t even make sense) among other key-pressed-state-poisoning things (though that part could be a software issue). This is particularly insulting as the original is NKRO. All up, it’s utterly unfit for purpose (the Space key is bad enough that even a hunt-and-pecker would probably notice), and the worst new keyboard I have ever encountered, by a significant margin, barring those dumb roll-up ones twenty years ago (they don’t exist any more, right? Right?).

² This isn’t true on all products: I ordered a battery at the same time, and they’ll let me return that without fuss. Which I will probably do, because despite being advertised and labelled as 5675 mAh like the original, it reports a design capacity of 4800 mAh. Straight up counterfeit/fraud. Sigh. So it’s <40% better than my five-year-old battery, instead of >60% better.

Like Kevin Costner, I’m surprised that HP keeps getting work.

It's OK their customers can all just upgrade to MacBook neos

Another mandatory wait time that’s annoying, Target. If you do driveup and you don’t tell them you’re coming, they literally have an software based wait time where you have to stare at the phone and wait for literally no reason.

The software could just add you to a queue and it could wait longer, but instead they make you watch the software do a countdown before you can ask for your order.

Mandatory wait times is an insane concept anyway

Wait 'till you hear about their printers.

If you're the customer support hotline, that's shitty practice.

On the other hand, if you're setting up an asshole filter (https://mrsteinberg.com/the-asshole-filter/), deliberately waiting a while before replying can be part of "chaotic good" tactics. You use my private email for something that has an official org process that we MUST use, per policy? It'll take me several days to reply, and then I'll ask you to use the official process anyway.

If you're setting up an asshole filter for your customers on the official support hotline, we used to call that "AITA?"

Just curious has anyone ever contacted customer support in the past decade and not gotten the message saying their call volume is high atm and thus the wait will be "longer than average"?

A company that behaves like this should never be purchased from again.

I think HP continues to see the real problem as getting caught, just like a liar isn't someone who lies, but lies and also gets caught.

After years of good experiences I'm pausing buying any more HP hardware. My recent Z series desktop was mis-assembled and customer service getting it resolved was atrocious, so incredibly bad it dissuaded me from even trying a replacement. I don't know what happened over there.

Some CIO thought it would be great to get rid of our local in office IT team and replaced them with a multi million contract with HP to use their “tier 1” support. Their service was absolute garbage. But the CIO got a fat bonus check for the “cost savings”

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126416

All the sudden it's a bad idea now that you can have people talk to a chat bot for 15 minutes.

Sound terrible but they’ve probably tried everything imaginable to reduce their call volume and weed out the lazy folk who could just read their website. Call centers are expensive.

This is unfortunately how companies die

to simplify things I am abandoning any technology that gives me grief, or hireing local profesionals to handle if there is any advantage in useing the technology. the flip side is that I am focusing on my real world abilities to manualy design and build things that those with technology and training struggle with sometimes,as all the technology in the world wont do 3d visualisations as fast as a brain that then can run one of the pen plotters it has on standby.

the title spews evil

My experience with customer support with every major company has always been a miserable one. The fundamental problem from my perspective is that if I've decided to call support that means I've already exhausted any other alternatives, and most likely my issue is one that explicitly requires human intervention because I've found myself wedged into a crack in the self-serve systems. I'm not particularly bothered by waiting 15 minutes, but what pisses me off the most is that when I finally do get a person they're also not empowered to do anything except read to me from a script that is word-for-word identical to the documentation on the website which was written by Legal instead of someone technically competent.

What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process.

Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access.

Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.

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Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck?

https://rubberduckdebugging.com/