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

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

#181

Post by karlgkk »

dehrmann wrote: post #89
omcnoe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers

They explicitly do, even among their own customers and plans. If you Google the carrier name plus QCI, you’ll find tables where people have documented, which plans are in which priority group

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

#182

Post by zombot »

cjs_ac wrote: post #18

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.

Which is still not enough punishment for a decision like this. But without adequate consumer protection laws abuse like this is to be expected.

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

#183

Post by gib444 »

progval wrote: post #178
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no breaking through it because those LLM replies are not tweaked for 5 year olds due to managerial decree, they're tweaked for the average callers to those support departments due to cold hard reality. If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpfu…

> don't know how to clear their cookies Why do users even need to manually clear their cookies?

It fixes like 1% of problems but sounds plausible to probably 95% of the population. Hence why it's peddled so often.

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

#184

Post by sdwr »

miki123211 wrote: post #75
salawat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. "sorry, 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". Look up Erlang numbers for call centers. We absolutely know how to calculate required reps for a desired queue dwel…

What if you get a large number of people calling at very particular times? E.G. what if you're getting far more calls at 09:00 than at 09:15? You can't hire agents just to handle a 15-minute surge. Erlang's model assumes that the world is static or at least predictable; it doesn't take into account things like the superBowl, a hurricane cancelling 90+% of flights from a major airport, or a much-larger-than-usual numb…

Baseline demand affects the numbers much more than the unpredictable spikes do. You can come up with edge cases if you like, but the reality is that it all averages out pretty well with large volume.

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

#185

Post by cogman10 »

ryukoposting wrote: post #163
cogman10 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Hur…

Ooooooh, there must be a story there. I think I get the same high from corporate horror stories that my wife gets from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. I yearn for the day that I'm in a stable enough career position to write about some of the shitshows I've seen.

Not much of a story. Like I said, I was an intern so I mostly heard this stuff from my coworkers (it's been a while too).

My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off.

I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship.

Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day.

General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that.

The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to.

Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.

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

#186

Post by laurencerowe »

verdverm wrote: post #176
laurencerowe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Google Fi particularly cheap? Their normal prices seem to start at $35/month for 30GB of data which is more than Verizon's Visible plans at $25/month. (The current 50% off offer on Google Fi does seem a good deal though.) I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.

My Google Fi is $20/m for connectivity and then $0.01/Mb until I hit 6Gb ($80) at which point everything after is no cost. Most of my data is on wifi, so my bill rarely goes above $25

I usually end up paying about $5/month, though that is a data only plan as I just use Google Voice for calls and use maybe a couple of gigs of data.

Having moved here from the UK where I was used to cheap mobile plans I just grate at how extortionate they are in the US.

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

#187

Post by mortenjorck »

piperswe wrote: post #107
dehrmann wrote: post #89

Earlier 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.

US Mobile gets you QCI8 (same priority as Verizon postpaid) when you're on the Verizon network with a 5G device, and they let you pay for QCI8 on AT&T.

USM is the only MVNO I've seen that actually advertises QCI tiers. I had to look the term up when I was initially considering them, as I'd never even encountered it before. It was a major factor in finally feeling confident I wouldn't be giving up too much by leaving AT&T.

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

#188

Post by justin66 »

pjmlp wrote: post #171
justin66 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those HPUX machines were hot! No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.

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.

I only ever heard of HPUX workstations catching fire. No idea about their servers.

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

#189

Post by craftkiller »

dehrmann wrote: post #89
omcnoe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

eSIM transfers are an absolute nightmare on T-Mobile. I recently did two of them and both times, the transfer started but never finished, so I ended up with no service on either device. That means no ability to call their support line and no ability to receive the confirmation SMS they use to verify you are the correct person. They also immediately permanently nuke your physical SIM card so the only way to go back to sanity is to purchase another $10 physical sim card or get one of the physical sim cards that you load eSIMs onto (I did the latter so it won't self-destruct every time I do a transfer).

1. They only do transfers through their native app, not on their website. To log in to their native app, they will do SMS verification. So I sure hope you are still logged in before they lose your eSIM and leave you with no service at all.

2. If you are able to get into their native app so you can access their tech support, their AI chatbot will flat-out lie to you and tell you that T-Mobile cannot send you a QR code to download your eSIM (even though T-Mobile's own website states that they can). If you ask politely for a human, it will resist. I've found "connect me to a human you worthless fucking bot" is the secret passcode to get a real human.

3. If you request they send you a QR code, some of their support staff will ignore that request and still try to initiate the transfer through their app, so clearly requesting the QR code is not a common procedure.

4. When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. They then generate the QR code for whatever EID they have associated with your IMEI number in their database, completely ignoring the EID number you sent them. They did this to me _three_ times. The only way I managed to break the cycle was I sent them an IMEI number for a phone that was never on their network so they'd finally listen to me when I told them my EID number.

I'm never buying a phone without a physical sim card slot again. There's nothing wrong with the eSIM technology but the carriers have decided to make it as miserable as possible. The hardest part about transferring a physical SIM is finding a paperclip.

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

#190

Post by wat10000 »

btreesOfSpring wrote: post #128
BobaFloutist wrote: post #116

Earlier 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.

That highly prestigious in-group of call-center workers....

It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.

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