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.
Do HP and Boeing recruit from the same candidate pools/train using the same employee manuals???
I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.
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 day.
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.
Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.
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.
Someone presumably pitched this idea within HP and other people agreed it was something they should try. I guess probably HP didn't put its best and brightest in charge of call centres but still, isn't that sort of amazing?
I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.
Optimizing the wrong thing, probably wanted to shave customer support costs by having lower call volumes, but those that need support probably were hanging onto the calls since nobody that can fix things calls support (so no savings) AND reduced customer satisfaction.
Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were hoping people would just hang up and give up. This would save money in the short term but lose money in the long term but that’s what you get when the current quarter is all that matters.
Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.
It depends what your goal is. If HP gets charged per call answered, then their goal is to minimize the number of calls they answer. If they see a most of their calls are like "my internet is slow" or the laptop won't turn on because it's not charged up, it's easy to see how this could be approved. Same thing if they've just spent a ton of money on some AI chat agent that they need to justify as well.
> Some HP workers were reportedly unhappy with the mandatory hold times, with an anonymous “insider” in HP’s European operations reportedly telling The Register, per its Thursday report: “Many within HP are pretty unhappy [about] the measures being taken and the fact those making decisions don’t have to deal with the customers who their decisions impact.”
Sounds to me like some customers who did get through after the 15 minutes then complained about the wait times to workers, which means the workers had to lie about the cause.
I'd argue that their excellent test equipment and printers allowed this to happen; anyone who made generic shit would have been quickly killed by all the blunders they made.
It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
No, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight.
HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
Rome once ruled the greatest empire on earth. Vs. look at the last few centuries of Italian history. Regression to mediocrity seems an inescapable part of human endeavor.
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. 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.
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.
>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 waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.
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. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing 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".
i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
I think it is a common practice, and another I think will be just a static set of times that they play the "higher than average call volumes" message, rather than anything dynamic. I think call centre stuff is incredibly basic, even though the domain isn't that complicated.
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
Even in my internal company tech support line they play that "higher than expected call volumes" message, but their website also has counter on it that tells you just how many people are on hold and even when it is just one (me) it plays that message.
>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 dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
Wait time is calculable; but you need an accurate forecast to staff and schedule. When I last worked in this space, forecasts were generated down to 15m granularity and agent work schedules (hours, break times, etc.) were derived from those forecasts.
The main problem is that once someone has made the decision to call, they've made their decision - a 15 minute hold isn't going to bother them much, and they certainly aren't going to do anything but sit there holding the phone.
If, instead, they had said "we'll call you back in about 15 minutes" and at the same time sent an email with chat/self help options it might have worked, because then you DO have 15 minutes to dick around.
I'm sure HP is bad but look at Nvidia's support forums. Most questions go unresolved but the close it after 14 days of inactivity and mark it resolved.
If you're the customer support hotline, that's shitty practice.
On the other hand, if you're setting up an asshole filter (https://mrsteinberg.com/the-asshole-filter/), deliberately waiting a while before replying can be part of "chaotic good" tactics. You use my private email for something that has an official org process that we MUST use, per policy? It'll take me several days to reply, and then I'll ask you to use the official process anyway.
If you're setting up an asshole filter for your customers on the official support hotline, we used to call that "AITA?"
My routine is that I curse at the voice bot and treat it really poorly and berate it, but then I'm really calm, polite, and professional with the real person I end up talking to. In the vast majority of cases, yelling a person is both rude in a strict moral sense, but also usually counterproductive even when viewed through a totally selfish lens.
That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.
There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)
After years of good experiences I'm pausing buying any more HP hardware. My recent Z series desktop was mis-assembled and customer service getting it resolved was atrocious, so incredibly bad it dissuaded me from even trying a replacement. I don't know what happened over there.
I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead episode Tech Support. Why the hell would those two dolts be allowed anywhere near a headset they picked up?
"See, Hamid: our goal is to help the customers - of course - but if we're on the phone too long, we don't make any money. We go out of business - and then what will the customers do?"
My experience with customer support with every major company has always been a miserable one. The fundamental problem from my perspective is that if I've decided to call support that means I've already exhausted any other alternatives, and most likely my issue is one that explicitly requires human intervention because I've found myself wedged into a crack in the self-serve systems. I'm not particularly bothered by waiting 15 minutes, but what pisses me off the most is that when I finally do get a person they're also not empowered to do anything except read to me from a script that is word-for-word identical to the documentation on the website which was written by Legal instead of someone technically competent.
What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process.
Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access.
Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.
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.
Do HP and Boeing recruit from the same candidate pools/train using the same employee manuals???
I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.
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 day.
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.
I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.
> made someone look bad
That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
It was offline.
AHT?
Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.
Average Handle Time
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.
[delayed]
I'll always despise them (and their Itanium) for killing the DEC Alpha CPU off after they acquired it along with Compaq.
Someone presumably pitched this idea within HP and other people agreed it was something they should try. I guess probably HP didn't put its best and brightest in charge of call centres but still, isn't that sort of amazing?
I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.
Optimizing the wrong thing, probably wanted to shave customer support costs by having lower call volumes, but those that need support probably were hanging onto the calls since nobody that can fix things calls support (so no savings) AND reduced customer satisfaction.
Depending of the country, legislation (and changes in them), the waiting time might be taxed as well. So a way to recoup some little costs.
Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were hoping people would just hang up and give up. This would save money in the short term but lose money in the long term but that’s what you get when the current quarter is all that matters.
Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.
It depends what your goal is. If HP gets charged per call answered, then their goal is to minimize the number of calls they answer. If they see a most of their calls are like "my internet is slow" or the laptop won't turn on because it's not charged up, it's easy to see how this could be approved. Same thing if they've just spent a ton of money on some AI chat agent that they need to justify as well.
> Some HP workers were reportedly unhappy with the mandatory hold times, with an anonymous “insider” in HP’s European operations reportedly telling The Register, per its Thursday report: “Many within HP are pretty unhappy [about] the measures being taken and the fact those making decisions don’t have to deal with the customers who their decisions impact.”
Sounds to me like some customers who did get through after the 15 minutes then complained about the wait times to workers, which means the workers had to lie about the cause.
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.
I'd argue that their excellent test equipment and printers allowed this to happen; anyone who made generic shit would have been quickly killed by all the blunders they made.
And great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...
They sort of still do!
It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
No, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight.
HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
The spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).
Rome once ruled the greatest empire on earth. Vs. look at the last few centuries of Italian history. Regression to mediocrity seems an inescapable part of human endeavor.
I love the way they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their actions
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. 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.
My first thought was "wow, those assholes."
But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?
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.
"Best available laptop support" apparently means 18/30 or 12/20.
Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
>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 waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.
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. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing 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".
i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.
[delayed]
There’s no doubt this is true in my mind.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
I think it is a common practice, and another I think will be just a static set of times that they play the "higher than average call volumes" message, rather than anything dynamic. I think call centre stuff is incredibly basic, even though the domain isn't that complicated.
It can't be that complicated.
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
Even in my internal company tech support line they play that "higher than expected call volumes" message, but their website also has counter on it that tells you just how many people are on hold and even when it is just one (me) it plays that message.
The only ones I believe are the ones that tell you the estimated wait time or number ahead of you (most of which offer to call you back).
It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
Easy for that to be true: just set your expectations to zero.
Did they admit to it? Or get caught?
>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 dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
Wait time is calculable; but you need an accurate forecast to staff and schedule. When I last worked in this space, forecasts were generated down to 15m granularity and agent work schedules (hours, break times, etc.) were derived from those forecasts.
I wonder how these systems work now...
> and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative
But you don't have those as a real alternative! Yes, you do have some "digital", but it's of the same awful quality as this mandatory 15min rule.
The main problem is that once someone has made the decision to call, they've made their decision - a 15 minute hold isn't going to bother them much, and they certainly aren't going to do anything but sit there holding the phone.
If, instead, they had said "we'll call you back in about 15 minutes" and at the same time sent an email with chat/self help options it might have worked, because then you DO have 15 minutes to dick around.
I'm sure HP is bad but look at Nvidia's support forums. Most questions go unresolved but the close it after 14 days of inactivity and mark it resolved.
If you're the customer support hotline, that's shitty practice.
On the other hand, if you're setting up an asshole filter (https://mrsteinberg.com/the-asshole-filter/), deliberately waiting a while before replying can be part of "chaotic good" tactics. You use my private email for something that has an official org process that we MUST use, per policy? It'll take me several days to reply, and then I'll ask you to use the official process anyway.
If you're setting up an asshole filter for your customers on the official support hotline, we used to call that "AITA?"
My routine is that I curse at the voice bot and treat it really poorly and berate it, but then I'm really calm, polite, and professional with the real person I end up talking to. In the vast majority of cases, yelling a person is both rude in a strict moral sense, but also usually counterproductive even when viewed through a totally selfish lens.
“improve customer tech support”
That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.
There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)
Wait 'till you hear about their printers.
This is unfortunately how companies die
After years of good experiences I'm pausing buying any more HP hardware. My recent Z series desktop was mis-assembled and customer service getting it resolved was atrocious, so incredibly bad it dissuaded me from even trying a replacement. I don't know what happened over there.
(2025)
I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead episode Tech Support. Why the hell would those two dolts be allowed anywhere near a headset they picked up?
"See, Hamid: our goal is to help the customers - of course - but if we're on the phone too long, we don't make any money. We go out of business - and then what will the customers do?"
I think HP continues to see the real problem as getting caught, just like a liar isn't someone who lies, but lies and also gets caught.
My experience with customer support with every major company has always been a miserable one. The fundamental problem from my perspective is that if I've decided to call support that means I've already exhausted any other alternatives, and most likely my issue is one that explicitly requires human intervention because I've found myself wedged into a crack in the self-serve systems. I'm not particularly bothered by waiting 15 minutes, but what pisses me off the most is that when I finally do get a person they're also not empowered to do anything except read to me from a script that is word-for-word identical to the documentation on the website which was written by Legal instead of someone technically competent.
What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process.
Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access.
Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.
Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck?
https://rubberduckdebugging.com/