17 ms·

HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)

• ta9000 7mo ago
  Like Kevin Costner, I’m surprised that HP keeps getting work.
• jqpabc123 7mo ago
  Just further cements HP's position as one of the most anti-consumer multi-national companies in existence.
  • onetokeoverthe 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • aurizon 7mo ago
    I love the way they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their actions
  • alnwlsn 7mo ago
    You would never suspect they once made some of the world's finest test/scientific equipment.
    • bell-cot 7mo ago
      Rome once ruled the greatest empire on earth. Vs. look at the last few centuries of Italian history. Regression to mediocrity seems an inescapable part of human endeavor.
    • bombcar 7mo ago
      I'd argue that their excellent test equipment and printers allowed this to happen; anyone who made generic shit would have been quickly killed by all the blunders they made.
    • StableAlkyne 7mo ago
      They sort of still do! It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • _ks3e 7mo ago
        The spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).
      • rnrn 7mo ago
        No, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight. HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
        • StableAlkyne 7mo ago
          Interesting, had no idea they used to make proper lab equipment
          • anonymousiam 7mo ago
            I've got two garages full of 80's and 90's HP lab equipment, and most of it even works. In that era, HP had the best hardware design/production capability in the world. Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).
    • pjmlp 7mo ago
      And great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...
      • justin66 7mo ago
        Those HPUX machines were hot! No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.
        • pjmlp 7mo ago
          Interesting, I used HP-UX across a few years, but never heard of heat moments that would require using an extinguisher on the server room.
          • justin66 7mo ago
            I only ever heard of HPUX workstations catching fire. No idea about their servers.
            • pjmlp 7mo ago
              This was during 1999-2002 and 2004-2006, HP-UX 10.x and 11.
• fancyfredbot 7mo ago
  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.
  • archerx 7mo ago
    Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were hoping people would just hang up and give up. This would save money in the short term but lose money in the long term but that’s what you get when the current quarter is all that matters. Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.
    • ornornor 7mo ago
      > Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing. Not at all, they say they’re “always looking for ways to improve customer experience” and just wanted to “encourage people to self solve” to increase customer satisfaction. /s
  • whizzter 7mo ago
    Optimizing the wrong thing, probably wanted to shave customer support costs by having lower call volumes, but those that need support probably were hanging onto the calls since nobody that can fix things calls support (so no savings) AND reduced customer satisfaction.
  • dfxm12 7mo ago
    It depends what your goal is. If HP gets charged per call answered, then their goal is to minimize the number of calls they answer. If they see a most of their calls are like "my internet is slow" or the laptop won't turn on because it's not charged up, it's easy to see how this could be approved. Same thing if they've just spent a ton of money on some AI chat agent that they need to justify as well.
  • 7mo ago
• john_strinlai 7mo ago
  >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.
  • philipallstar 7mo ago
    I think it is a common practice, and another I think will be just a static set of times that they play the "higher than average call volumes" message, rather than anything dynamic. I think call centre stuff is incredibly basic, even though the domain isn't that complicated.
    • jandrese 7mo ago
      Even in my internal company tech support line they play that "higher than expected call volumes" message, but their website also has counter on it that tells you just how many people are on hold and even when it is just one (me) it plays that message.
      • InitialLastName 7mo ago
        Easy for that to be true: just set your expectations to zero.
      • bombcar 7mo ago
        The only ones I believe are the ones that tell you the estimated wait time or number ahead of you (most of which offer to call you back). It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
• eviks 7mo ago
  > 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.
  • bombcar 7mo ago
    The main problem is that once someone has made the decision to call, they've made their decision - a 15 minute hold isn't going to bother them much, and they certainly aren't going to do anything but sit there holding the phone. If, instead, they had said "we'll call you back in about 15 minutes" and at the same time sent an email with chat/self help options it might have worked, because then you DO have 15 minutes to dick around.
• cjs_ac 7mo ago
  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.
  • omcnoe 7mo ago
    It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see these exact same market dynamics at work in the mobile telco industry. Newer online only upstarts able to save on costs because they don’t operate a retail store you can visit to get help resetting your email password.
    • Clent 7mo ago
      Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers. The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
      • array_key_first 7mo ago
        With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
        • ryandrake 7mo ago
• dsr_ 7mo ago
  "Best available laptop support" apparently means 18/30 or 12/20. Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
• red_admiral 7mo ago
  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/ 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?"
  • everdrive 7mo ago
    My routine is that I curse at the voice bot and treat it really poorly and berate it, but then I'm really calm, polite, and professional with the real person I end up talking to. In the vast majority of cases, yelling a person is both rude in a strict moral sense, but also usually counterproductive even when viewed through a totally selfish lens.
• iinnPP 7mo ago
  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.
  • fifilura 7mo ago
    > made someone look bad That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
    • iinnPP 7mo ago
      It was offline.
    • MBCook 7mo ago
      And making each click trigger a 20 second DB query doesn’t? How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?
      • fifilura 7mo ago
        If you prefetch all those options in the background, I bet the DB would be unhappy.
  • oofbey 7mo ago
    AHT?
    • iinnPP 7mo ago
      Average Handle Time
    • LordGrey 7mo ago
      Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.
• lambdaone 7mo ago
  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.
  • drewg123 7mo ago
    I'll always despise them (and their Itanium) for killing the DEC Alpha CPU off after they acquired it along with Compaq.
  • tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
    They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.
  • ryukoposting 7mo ago
    It is staggering how much HP has fallen from grace. I don't think a lot of people my age even know. If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell"). HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore. The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor. They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.
    • cogman10 7mo ago
      That was basically entirely on Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and the board of directors. It's pretty similar to what happened to Boeing. HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company. Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.
• techpulse_x 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• adolph 7mo ago
  Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck? https://rubberduckdebugging.com/ https://rubberduckdebugging.com/
• itopaloglu83 7mo ago
  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.
• fhn 7mo ago
  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.
• jgbuddy 7mo ago
  This is unfortunately how companies die
• jmull 7mo ago
  “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.)
• hedgehog 7mo ago
  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.
• tristor 7mo ago
  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/ 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.
• xg15 7mo ago
  > 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.
  • imzadi 7mo ago
    As someone who has worked in a call center, it's not just that they complain, but they complain a lot and become much more difficult to work with. A customer who has been on hold for a long time can take twice as long to resolve because they spend so much time complaining and refusing to do what you ask them to do.
    • temporallobe 7mo ago
      Yeah it’s almost like purposely frustrating people has negative consequences, which HP completely overlooked.
      • Macha 7mo ago
        HP didn’t care, that was a problem for the low level support staff and the customers, not whatever exec was hoping to show reduced call volumes -> reduced staffing levels -> savings.
    • duskdozer 7mo ago
      Wow, you mean to say intentionally pissing off people who are already probably pissed off makes them more difficult to work with? That doesn't sound right.
  • darth_avocado 7mo ago
    The fact that I’m calling an HP support line automatically means I’m annoyed. Keeping me waiting for 15 mins will only leave me inflamed. I have better emotional regulation but dealing with customer service sometimes pushes me to the “being assertive but polite” phase, which a lot of people will just skip. And for the workers, there’s only so much abuse you can take in a day.
• kotaKat 7mo ago
  (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?"
• lich_king 7mo ago
  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.
  • drstewart 7mo ago
    Wow, other countries sound like utopia! Can you tell me how to reach RyanAir by phone and how long it will take? How about Evri? China Southern?
    • aboardRat4 7mo ago
      China Southern is okay if you speak Chinese.
  • tristor 7mo ago
    > United? FWIW, Airlines are actually great /if/ you're a frequent flyer. I get great service from United on the phone and did so previously from Delta, but in both cases I was a frequent traveler and so they automatically route your call into a better queue with better trained staff.
  • commandersaki 7mo ago
    I think in the consumer electronics space this is where Apple shines and is heavily underrated. People balk at the prices of their products, but if you've ever used their support, they are easy to access and approach, in-store, over the phone, or live chat -- for any of their product and services -- and always try to get to the bottom of your issue. Oftentimes I end up solving the problem myself as I troubleshoot with them, or find a bug that requires an engineer to track on their backend that doesn't get fixed until 2 or 3 major releases later, but at least it's been flagged. This type of support cannot be had with any of the PC vendors it seems.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• ryukoposting 7mo ago
  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?
  • f_devd 7mo ago
    Wouldn't be surprised if they have their own internal PBX system with a SIP trunk
    • ryukoposting 7mo ago
      Sigh. VoIP makes everything less interesting.
  • justin66 7mo ago
    I mean, any system has the ability to play a message before putting the call into a queue. Make the message fifteen minutes of muzak…
  • tiagod 7mo ago
    Many call centers have these privacy messages that play before you're actually put on hold. Just use the same feature with a 15min of waiting music.
    • ryukoposting 7mo ago
      Ah, so that the music changes and/or clips when you jump into the call queue. That way, you know you just got mishandled for 15 minutes. Diabolical.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• vjvjvjvjghv 7mo ago
  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.
  • laughing_man 7mo ago
    HP has plenty of competition. What they're doing is suicidal.
    • kykat 7mo ago
      I honestly don't know who is still buying HP products, haven't seen one around me in years, probably just clueless people walking into a store and thinking "I've heard this name before"
      • vjvjvjvjghv 7mo ago
        My employer buys HP products
      • ornornor 7mo ago
        Corporates. I see so many HP monitors, laptops. I guess their leasing terms are good, financially?
• josefritzishere 7mo ago
  Wait 'till you hear about their printers.
• canucker2016 7mo ago
  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.
  • bitwize 7mo ago
    Hewlett-Packard split into two companies some years back: HP Inc. which handles the consumer PC and printer business; and Hewlett Packard Enterprise which handles all their server and enterprise stuff, and consulting.
• Steve16384 7mo ago
  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.
  • delecti 7mo ago
    I would actually expect support calls to be more bimodal between customers who use them as a last resort or first resort. If I'm calling support for something then I have probably already tried everything within my power. But there are absolutely people who will call as the first step, for a variety of reasons (maybe they're too technologically illiterate to even approach the problem, or maybe they feel like being a customer entitles them to technical support, which isn't totally unjustified).
  • Sohcahtoa82 7mo ago
    > I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them. Based on the anecdata I have, this is very false. My brother used to work tech support for X-Box Live. He said 80% of his calls were for password resets, something anybody could self-service in less time than it takes to find the customer support phone number. Sure, there were cases where they no longer had access to the original e-mail address on the account, or cases where he was sure someone was trying to social engineer their way into someone else's account by claiming a forgotten password, but generally, he'd just trigger the password reset e-mail and the customer was able to reset their password. At one point, he tried going off-script to tell people to select the "Forgot Password" option and walk them through the self-service, but he got in trouble for it.
• g947o 7mo ago
  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.
  • ectospheno 7mo ago
    Indeed. The older I get the more I optimize for my time spent over almost all other factors. I want to enjoy life more.
    • doubled112 7mo ago
      The older I get, the more money I have available to optimize for time spent. A man I worked with told me that eventually his entire toolbox was a VISA. He could fix just about anything, he just couldn't be bothered anymore unless it seemed like fun. I didn't get it then, in my early 20s. In my mid 30s, with a couple of kids and a million other things to get done, shut up and take my money. Android phones to tinker with became an iPhone that just works for years. 15 year old VWs turned into 3 year old Toyotas. Probably other choices I've made without realizing it too.
• hellmar 7mo ago
  [dead]
• closeparen 7mo ago
  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.
  • halapro 7mo ago
    That gets expensive fast. Most phone support tech is composed of average gents who are given a 60 minutes introduction to the system and wished good luck. So cheap, so many unemployed people to choose from.
  • mmooss 7mo ago
    I've seen that option with other major vendors too. It's always worth the extra cost for a business - incidents' internal time to resolution, labor costs, and downtime (which impact user productivity) can drop dramatically. It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.
• ryguz 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• Havoc 7mo ago
  Mandatory wait times is an insane concept anyway
• caderosche 7mo ago
  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.
• kevinpet 7mo ago
  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.
  • inetknght 7mo ago
    100% this.
• xvxvx 7mo ago
  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.
  • Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    >Call centers are expensive. Not as expensive as having no customers.
• daft_pink 7mo ago
  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.
• kylehotchkiss 7mo ago
  It's OK their customers can all just upgrade to MacBook neos
• syntaxing 7mo ago
  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”
• chrismorgan 7mo ago
  > 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.
  • commandersaki 7mo ago
    At least in Amazon AU when you "chat now" you immediately say you want to speak to a specialist and everything is smooth sailing.
• vladde 7mo ago
  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.
• fechols 7mo ago
  What if I told you that customer support is a marketing expense?
• jefftrebben 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Night_Thastus 7mo ago
  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?
• ACV001 7mo ago
  the title spews evil
• waynesonfire 7mo ago
  All the sudden it's a bad idea now that you can have people talk to a chat bot for 15 minutes.
• LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
  I have a Ford EV and a local Ford dealer refused to do warranty work on it because I didn't buy it there.
• Footnote7341 7mo ago
  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.
  • midtake 7mo ago
    Not if un-happiness compounds over time spent in a hold queue, and instant responses produce asymptotically incalculable happiness.
• corvad 7mo ago
  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.
• everyone 7mo ago
  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"?
• metalman 7mo ago
  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.
• ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
  Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126416
• bilekas 7mo ago
  My god this is comic book villain level of business behaviour. Honestly whoever comes up with these decisions needs an exorcism.
• ornornor 7mo ago
  > 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 https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
• petterroea 7mo ago
  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
• silexia 7mo ago
  A company that behaves like this should never be purchased from again.
• wolvoleo 7mo ago
  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.