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”
HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
131–140 of 249 posts
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#132> 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.
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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 60% better.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this not begging the question that 99 out of 100 were wrong? This totally depends if the aim is the solve problems or to reduce support costs - which are not necessarily the same thing. If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hol…
Maybe the online FAQ/support flow should give you a one-time skip-the-line code that you append to the phone number or something.
While I haven't heard of that idea being implemented, I have heard of the support page you're looking at determine who you got routed to if you started a support chat.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#134I 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 da…
> made someone look bad That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
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?
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
>my AHT flagged me Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?
Acronym use here to single being part of an in-group. It is one of the most annoying shift in tech language over the past decade. I partly blame it on all the certification testing that has popped up over that time frame. It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
This one is a call center metric. Similar to after call work or first call resolution. This one, I believe, is average handle time.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue. But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
Personally switched from VZW to Google Fi. It's on TMOs network. As you can imagine, when engaging with Google's support was hilarious when there was something I needed, but overall I don't miss Verizon and pay drastically less.
For those of us who have crappy coverage with TMO, Verizon themselves offer a much better alternative to their postpaid service, called Visible. It's pretty hilarious how much better of an experience it is, and you are on the same network.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#137What 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.
Well, it's not the same HP. If there was ever a case that Ship of Theseus is not the same it's with companies. It just takes but a few replacement to get an entirely different company, mostly same people, same name, same business, completely different. Yet alone when the company has turned over everyone over decades, including customers. This is not the HP we knew.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this not begging the question that 99 out of 100 were wrong? This totally depends if the aim is the solve problems or to reduce support costs - which are not necessarily the same thing. If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hol…
Maybe the online FAQ/support flow should give you a one-time skip-the-line code that you append to the phone number or something.
One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#139What 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.
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, o…
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.
Re: HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
#140The 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.
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old. The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustr…
People suicided because of that, and the UK post office knew fully well it was their own fault.