HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨criss_cross@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/misguided-hp-customer-support-approach-included-forced-15-minute-call-wait-times/

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.”

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Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨46⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
I self-solved my HP problems by never buying from HP again. I love by Brother printer. Don’t any of you dare quote stories about Brother enshittifying stuff in the replies (I will cry).

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- criss_cross@lemmy.world ⁨45⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Even if they did it’s nowhere near the level of HP
  
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PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world ⁨41⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
“an odd approach”

Otherwise known as lying.

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Renorc@lemmy.world ⁨52⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
Top three work PCs for my work are Dell, Lenovo, and HP. I didn’t even consider HP on the last purchase. Not that the others options are great but never HP.

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mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
“influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve”

Corporate speakers should be paddled

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- otacon239@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  Sounds like a great way to increase their adoption of a competitor’s product
  
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  - YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    They have paid good money to lawmakers to make sure that brother is never widely adopted.
    
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Crookclaw@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
While hilarious, that’s more than a year old…

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- criss_cross@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Well shit. I saw it on hacker news and thought it was recent.
  
  My bad for not paying attention.
  
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  - Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    To be fair, if you got on hold with HP support on the day the article was published, you’d still be onhold today.
    
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- Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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Vanth@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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. Depending on call volume and time or 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.

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- paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  This sounds very humane and reasonable.
  
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Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Having run a couple support team, 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.

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- WesternInfidels@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things up on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.
  
  Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.
  
  But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make any sense of any documentation we could write. Some of them didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like; didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.
  
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- SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Thankfully we didn’t take phone calls. And I knew they weren’t reading the KB because we’d reply with a link tot be KB and they’d be happy.
    
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khendron@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Nobody hates their customers like HP hates their customers.

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- mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  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.
  
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spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
My laptops typically last until the hardware is well past obsolete, but not HP’s garbage. My HP X360 laptop’s motherboard failed completely and the hinges just fell apart for the 2nd time. This POS didn’t last 3 years of occasional use. Never again.

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- KingOfSleep@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  HP stands for “Hinge Problems”.
  
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teft@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s never “high call volume”. It’s always “not enough customer service representatives”.

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- PhoenixDog@lemmy.world ⁨29⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I had to use support for a product I bought recently, 3 times I had to call them, and every time I got through within 2 minutes! And my issues were quickly fixed.

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sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
HP is one of the dumbest tech companies

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