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

91–100 of 249 posts

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

#91

Post by Macha »

temporallobe wrote: post #67
imzadi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in a call center, it's not just that they complain, but they complain a lot and become much more difficult to work with. A customer who has been on hold for a long time can take twice as long to resolve because they spend so much time complaining and refusing to do what you ask them to do.

Yeah it’s almost like purposely frustrating people has negative consequences, which HP completely overlooked.

HP didn’t care, that was a problem for the low level support staff and the customers, not whatever exec was hoping to show reduced call volumes -> reduced staffing levels -> savings.

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

#92

Post by ectospheno »

g947o wrote: post #74

Marginally related: I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions) I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either n…

Indeed. The older I get the more I optimize for my time spent over almost all other factors. I want to enjoy life more.

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

#93

Post by kykat »

laughing_man wrote: post #73
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #55

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.

HP has plenty of competition. What they're doing is suicidal.

I honestly don't know who is still buying HP products, haven't seen one around me in years, probably just clueless people walking into a store and thinking "I've heard this name before"

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

#95

Post by LeifCarrotson »

gib444 wrote: post #76
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.

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…

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 helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.

Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.

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

#97

Post by ssl-3 »

Clent wrote: post #68
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.

Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers. The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because onl…

Centralizing support generally saves money.

There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city.

Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them.

When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone.

(That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)

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

#99

Post by doubled112 »

ectospheno wrote: post #92
g947o wrote: post #74

Marginally related: I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions) I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either n…

Indeed. The older I get the more I optimize for my time spent over almost all other factors. I want to enjoy life more.

The older I get, the more money I have available to optimize for time spent.

A man I worked with told me that eventually his entire toolbox was a VISA. He could fix just about anything, he just couldn't be bothered anymore unless it seemed like fun.

I didn't get it then, in my early 20s. In my mid 30s, with a couple of kids and a million other things to get done, shut up and take my money.

Android phones to tinker with became an iPhone that just works for years. 15 year old VWs turned into 3 year old Toyotas. Probably other choices I've made without realizing it too.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

array_key_first wrote: post #79
Clent wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers. The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because onl…

With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN