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.”
Im so glad a company finally admitted that the “we’re experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume” was just bullshit.
You know we’re gonna be talking to ai slop machines next. I’d rather wait 15 minutes for a human.
… Wut? Who thought this was a good idea in the first place 😭
Some moron with an MBA, as per usual.
Ok so why is this such a widely adopted model by government and cellphone services increasing it up to waiting for hours on the phone ? It’s like they want you to afford to have these things but don’t expect anyone to have to have a job to earn enough to have these things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
