Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–249 of 249 posts

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

#241

Post by rstuart4133 »

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.

> What a fantastic company HP used to be,

The company you are thinking of still exists. It was split from HP in 1999. It is called Agilent Technologies. HP kept the name and went into the business of flogging commodity computer products, Agilent continues to design and sell low volume high end gear and kept the engineering culture that requires.

HP later split again into consumer and corporate. To put the result into perspective HP Inc's (consumer) revenue is $55B/yr, HP Enterprise is $37B/yr, and Agilent is $7B/yr.

Given the crap being thrown here you would think the splits were a disaster. I don't know if the engineering culture of Agilent would have survived if it hadn't happened.

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

#242

Post by graemep »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #202
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 a…

Its the economics of an oligopolistic market compounded by an information problem - mist people do jot know how good customer support will be at the time they buy.

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

#243

Post by sevenseacat »

sigseg1v wrote: post #229
dwedge wrote: post #104

Earlier 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…

I have a very similar issue where yesterday I found a company sent me to collections for not paying for an item that is paid for and I have the receipts and bank statements for. Trying to get the chat bot to drop the charge on my account is literally not possible, and I understand why, but why is it so excruciating to get in contact with someone to resolve this? The effort levels are totally disproportionate; they ha…

If there's a button to bypass all their automated systems and get to a person, then far too many people will press it - nearly entirely people whose problems can already be resolved by the automated systems.

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

#244

Post by gopher_space »

marcosdumay wrote: post #114
gopher_space wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knows morale is a dump stat... if you don't track consequences.

Well, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.

Interesting to think about how often I'm fighting both sides of that coin.

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

#245

Post by anonymars »

gopher_space wrote: post #244
marcosdumay wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.

Interesting to think about how often I'm fighting both sides of that coin.

With time, I've come to think the trouble is--as usual--there's no singular right answer, only trade-offs

Sabermetrics (Moneyball) captivated us with the idea that "gut feelings" and "stories" were inferior to raw hard data, but that same notion could also accurately be called "the McNamara fallacy"

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

#246

Post by commandersaki »

lich_king wrote: post #51

I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not providing it if the product is problem-free for 99% of your users. Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with…

I think in the consumer electronics space this is where Apple shines and is heavily underrated. People balk at the prices of their products, but if you've ever used their support, they are easy to access and approach, in-store, over the phone, or live chat -- for any of their product and services -- and always try to get to the bottom of your issue. Oftentimes I end up solving the problem myself as I troubleshoot with them, or find a bug that requires an engineer to track on their backend that doesn't get fixed until 2 or 3 major releases later, but at least it's been flagged.

This type of support cannot be had with any of the PC vendors it seems.

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

#247

Post by commandersaki »

chrismorgan wrote: post #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 retu…

At least in Amazon AU when you "chat now" you immediately say you want to speak to a specialist and everything is smooth sailing.

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

#248

Post by hronecviktor »

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…

As an intern at @bankcompany I decided to go one step further than what my ticket was asking for and decided to implement something that crunched data in a very obvious way. Was nicely asked to revert it, because @bankcompany already had several fulltime employees doing exactly the same thing.

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

#249

Post by yencabulator »

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.

Google Fi punches above its weight class as an MVNO. It's apparently often even prioritized better than many telcos' own cheap plans.

(Obvious downside: It's Google.)

Post reply on HN