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

arstechnica.com

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

#201

Post by agumonkey »

lambdaone wrote: post #32

What 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.

Isn't this an unavoidable company pattern? Early on you go all in to prove your mastery. Then your reverse course to ramp benefits or something like that.

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

#202

Post by ticulatedspline »

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.

While I tend to lean towards libertarian the reality is that "someone will fill the market gap and customers will leave" is largely a myth. Even without lock in or other reasons the market tends to be rather shallow with only a few choices. Maybe HP is the instigator but it largely signals to their competitors that "hey you can be abusive too". This creates a casual follow-the-leader collusion then everywhere sucks and there's nowhere to go anyway so why leave.

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

#205

Post by ok_dad »

iinnPP wrote: post #63
imzadi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.

The AHT value indeed went down 3 minutes below the average, which is generally a good thing so long as you are doing everything well still. All outliers get checked and mine was the lowest. I was honest about the tool, including that it was offline. Their supposed policy was no personal tools and as it was during "probation" (first 90 days in Ontario), they could fire without cause, and did, immediately.

A good business would have promoted you to the dev team so they could reduce that metric for everyone.

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

#206

Post by nubg »

junon wrote: post #71
iinnPP wrote: post #26

I 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…

Quasi-related but I did the same thing at RadioShack for inventory. It was a long process of scanning each product, looking at the scanner and manually verifying the price on the tag. The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format. So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that c…

> understandably

why?

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

#207

Post by teeray »

omcnoe wrote: post #59
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.

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.

It’s always amazing going to these stores and seeing the support they provide for frequent “how do I computer?” questions. To me, this is like going to the water department because you need a new faucet on the kitchen sink. We make no such distinctions about who fixes what for purveyors of Internet services though.

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

#208

Post by junon »

nubg wrote: post #206
junon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quasi-related but I did the same thing at RadioShack for inventory. It was a long process of scanning each product, looking at the scanner and manually verifying the price on the tag. The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format. So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that c…

> understandably why?

I was running scripts on their PoS (EDIT: point of sale) terminals to hit an internal service. If I were the sysadmin at corporate, people like me would make me nervous too (even though I wasn't doing anything nefarious).

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

#209

Post by metalman »

to simplify things I am abandoning any technology that gives me grief, or hireing local profesionals to handle if there is any advantage in useing the technology. the flip side is that I am focusing on my real world abilities to manualy design and build things that those with technology and training struggle with sometimes,as all the technology in the world wont do 3d visualisations as fast as a brain that then can run one of the pen plotters it has on standby.
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