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.”
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 support sucks. They wanted me to buy a support package to get a link to a driver. Like, fuck off.
capitalism is never about the product
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.
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.
It’s a known brand, that’s the reason why people choose it.
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.
I completely stonewalled the comcast retention stuff and I think I cut the entire call down to 5 minutes once I had someone on the line. I almost felt bad because she was clearly new and had a trainer with her. I just kept saying ‘just cancel the service’ every attempt to ask me something was met with ‘have you cancelled the service yet’
Lady I have anxiety about phone calls, I am not happy I have to make one. If I have to play this conversation through in my head 100 times then we’re following one of the scripts I have ready, not comcast’s.
I’ll remember that trick.
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.
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.
On a new service I like to mash the # key a couple times. Sometimes it skips the options & puts me in a queue for generic customer support.
I self-solved my HP problems by never buying from HP again. I love my Brother printer. Don’t any of you dare quote stories about Brother enshittifying stuff in the replies (I will cry).
Brother has started selling printers that require an ink or toner subscription. I had to watch out for that last time I bought one.
Even if they get worse, I’m sure another brand will take their place.
I just bought an MFC color laser printer of theirs, first thing I immediately did was block it from connecting to the internet in my firewall. I guess I’m lucky it still has an older fw version installed. Hopefully I can buy 3rd party toner, I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
For me the solution is simply to just not own a printer. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to print something in the last year. Anyway that’s what parents are for, their house is where you store things you only occasionally want.
But doctor… I am the parent.
Seriously, half the stuff that we print is coloring pages.
Even if they did it’s nowhere near the level of HP
Yet.
I assume every large company and bank (big or small) does this kinda shit on the regular
“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.
Yes, because the #1 thing everyone wants to hear over and over is a voice saying “go to double u double u double u dot…”
This is the fucking 21st century if they could fix their shit on the internet they would have already done it.
Especially pisses me off when the only reason you’re calling them is because their website /portal / app explicitly went “you can’t do that here, call us”
Even better than that is Siteground’s absolutely abysmal support system.
In order to access support they force you to type your question into their chatbot first. This is not optional. It’s the only way to get support.
Fools that we are, we actually tried the solution the chatbot offered. This resulted in a good amount of time wasted looking for settings that didn’t exist, because the solution was total bullshit. They claim they’ve customized this thing to give helpful outputs, but it’s clearly just ChatGPT with a custom prompt.
When we finally spoke to an agent I pointed this out and they responded with the stock “You should always double check the output of AI” line.
DOUBLE CHECK WITH WHOM, YOU MOUTH BREATHING MORON? THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL FUCKING SUPPORT CHANNEL. YOU LITERALLY DIDN’T GIVE ME ACCESS TO ANY OTHER KIND OF SUPPORT UNTIL I USED THE CHATBOT FIRST, SO WHERE IN THE ACTUAL FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DOUBLE CHECK THE OUTPUT?
Is it with a customer service agent? Is that what you’re saying?! That I should ignore whatever it tells me, wait until I can talk to a representative and then do whatever they say instead? Because if that’s the case, WHY IN THE FUCK ARE YOU FORCING EVERYONE TO TALK TO THE BOT FIRST??!!!
Absolutely fucking asinine idiocy. Anyway, don’t use Siteground, they fucking suck.
You shouldn’t talk to customer support agents like that. They’re not responsible for the actions of the shitty company, and you are giving them a bad day for no reason.
Actually, the tough love approach can encourage them to find a job less damaging to the soul.
They don’t take such a job because they want to.
Jesus fucking Christ.
OK little Timmy, today we’re going to learn that sometimes people express things in their “inner voice”, but they don’t share those things in their “outer voice”.
And sometimes, later, they might share those “inner voice” thoughts with other people in an environment where it’s safe to do. But it doesn’t mean they have to express those inner voice thoughts to the person that they were thinking them about?
Does that help you understand better? Would youv maybe like a juice box and a lie down to think about it?
Yeah ran into that a month or so back with some service or other. Account was locked out, I told the prompt I was looking for an account unlock, I got to listen to “you can do most things by logging into your account at” for 45 minutes.
Online banking does this all of the time. It’s surprising how little you can actually do on their app, virtually every common banking task requires you to call them.
I had to call them to set up an automatic payment on my credit card from my savings account. Because I couldn’t work out how to do it on the app. I confirmed with the support agent that you can’t do it on the app.
I have found that if I yell or sound angry at the LLM prompt, I’ll get an agent faster than if I am a proper adult
If you swear or use certain words/phrases/tones there are absolutely some that put you into a higher priority queue. There are also some that immediately kick you into that queue the moment you swear, bypassing any info gathering and such.
I’ve had to use it for things like Verizon which absolutely expects the LLM to be able to verify your account, but their account verification was broken. Swear at it a little and suddenly the account verification is no longer needed.
Haven’t found that one yet… mostly it’s either faster or just as shitty
Could be worse: You could be made to sit through aich tee tee pee colon slash slash double u double u double u dot…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
What he is saying is, while a lot of the phone calls you got were answered with the KB, this doesn’t reflect the people who didn’t call because they used the KB. For that, you would need to track total sales, new customer intake, volume over time, etc. It’s quite possible you could have customers who got a KB reply from your support staff in a timely manner and decided if it was that easy for you to get an answer to them, it would be worth it for them to try it before calling next time.
Of course, the reality is quite likely that the main users of the knowledge base you built was the support team, which still isn’t a loss.
Oh, totally. Having a KB full of ready made answers reduced response times and increased customer satistfaction
Thanks 💖
I was too tired to come back yesterday.
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 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 sense of any documentation we could write. Some 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.
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.
