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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)

#51

Post by lich_king »

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 the service you purchased.

There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.

But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.

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

#52

Post by pjmlp »

alnwlsn wrote: post #12
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

Just further cements HP's position as one of the most anti-consumer multi-national companies in existence.

You would never suspect they once made some of the world's finest test/scientific equipment.

And great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...

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

#55

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

American companies seem to increasingly hate their own customers. Add random fees, make products worse and provide terrible support. In a functioning market small competitors would take away the business of the big players but with the lack of monopoly enforcement they just buy their competition. Not sure where this is leading but it's not a good trend.

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

#56

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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.

They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.

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

#57

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

john_strinlai wrote: post #6

> 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.” > Even if HP’s telephone support center wasn’t busy, callers would reportedly hear: We are experiencing longer…

"i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. "

Health insurance does this for sure. From what I have seen I am convinced they have sophisticated systems to frustrate patients and providers until they give up.

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

#58

Post by _2d30 »

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…

If yours was instant, why would your AHT decline? Shouldn’t you be way faster? On many questions you would have saved over 3mins on network calls alone.

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

#59

Post by omcnoe »

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.
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