- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.
In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.
Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said 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.”
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… Wut? Who thought this was a good idea in the first place 😭
HP is one of those companies whose products you can easily avoid. I don’t understand their dominance in the printer market, or why people continue to buy their products when many of them are objectively poor. I also don’t recall a time when HP had a particularly strong reputation to begin with.
At this point, most competitors offer better alternatives than HP.
It’s a known brand, that’s the reason why people choose it.
No, their laptops were pretty good about 10-12 years ago. Mac guy, but Macs weren’t great in the Intel era. I was advised to get an HP laptop. The one I was looking at was very highly rated. Can’t remember the name. Bought one from Asus with better specs. I would have been fine with the HP.
We used to have Elite Desks at work and they are dogshit. I kinda want one though. 8th Gen i5 with 8GB RAM. I wanna toss the hard drive and put an SSD in it. Then put Steam OS on it. I bet it would be decent for 2000s PC gaming. Like up to Skyrim.
Current gen omnibooks are really good if you can ignore or cover the AI branding. They’re also a really good value especially with how often they’re on sale. Source: I bought one a year ago and it’s been very good.
There are better printers than HP, but they have a solid niche where they’re the least expensive enterprise printers that aren’t entirely garbage.
Least expensive until you have to buy ink or toner.
My laptops typically last until the hardware is well past obsolete, but not HP’s garbage. My HP X360 laptop’s motherboard failed completely and the hinges just fell apart for the 2nd time. This POS didn’t last 3 years of occasional use. Never again.
HP stands for “Hinge Problems”.
While hilarious, that’s more than a year old…
Well shit. I saw it on hacker news and thought it was recent.
My bad for not paying attention.
To be fair, if you got on hold with HP support on the day the article was published, you’d still be onhold today.
It was on hold until now to encourage self discovery or sth
I’m just glad we didn’t have to hold the line for a year to read this.
Having run a couple support team, I get where they’re coming from with the wait time.
Every minute my team wasn’t spending helping customers was spent updating the knowledge base. We invested a ton of effort into it, and 90% of the tickets were answerable in the first interaction with a simple search.
But getting people to actually read the docs was impossible. And maybe if we made them wait they’d get frustrated
But that’s not very nice to your customers or the agents.
I can guarantee making them wait won’t make them read if that wasn’t their first choice to begin with. All you’re doing is making them angrier for when they finally do get connected to a person.
How could you tell that people were not reading the knowledge base? They probably didn’t need to call if they did, so maybe you reduced the volume by 50%. I get what you are trying to say, but if they make me wait 15 minutes just because, I’m going to be pissed once I reach someone. Then the person who doesn’t deserve my bad temper will feel it and I will never buy hardware from you again.
And I’m saying that despite having worked at customer support for years, writing knowledge-base entries and developing the system we used to store it.
Thankfully we didn’t take phone calls. And I knew they weren’t reading the KB because we’d reply with a link to the KB and they’d be happy.
Yes, but I mean how do you know people didn’t read it.
But getting people to actually read the docs was impossible. And maybe if we made them wait they’d get frustrated
You probably didn’t see the ones reading into it, just the ones that didn’t.
The only time the KB really saved was being able to send them a link to the docs that they should have been able to find instead of retyping the response.
All of the answers were right there and they didn’t see it. And no matter how many articles we added the volume of tickets resolved on the first reply with a KB article didn’t go down. (I know because I tracked this as a KPI for a while until it became obvious it wasn’t budging.)
My only conclusion from this is that there is a segment of people who will always ask someone for help rather than take initiative.
What he is saying is, while a lot of the phone calls you got were answered with the KB, this doesn’t reflect the people who didn’t call because they used the KB. For that, you would need to track total sales, new customer intake, volume over time, etc. It’s quite possible you could have customers who got a KB reply from your support staff in a timely manner and decided if it was that easy for you to get an answer to them, it would be worth it for them to try it before calling next time.
Of course, the reality is quite likely that the main users of the knowledge base you built was the support team, which still isn’t a loss.
When I started at one company I put together a text file with all the different sources of info I found in training. By the end of training I had turned it into an HTML file. Years later we got bought out. Support from corporate disappeared on legacy customs who hadn’t moved over to new stuff.
A coworker tapped me on the shoulder “If I were to make a local network web server on one of these computers could I upload your help system to it for everyone to use?”
Next thing you know I’m the default source for all information on every system that has ever existed. Prior to that everyone knew that I had it all in my brain but only a handful of people knew that I also had it all in HTML.
TL;DR I built a pirate help desk knowledge base.
I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things up on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.
Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.
But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.
I’m currently struggling with a product that I’d love to use the knowledge base for help but they keep changing their goddamn gui every version so the knowledge base docs never apply to me. “Click on files->database->security”, uhhh, there is no “security” under “database” you mother f’ers…
I had to use support for a product I bought recently (NRGi/Zaptec EV charger), 3 times I had to call them, and every time I got through within 2 minutes! And my issues were quickly fixed.
Top three work PCs for my work are Dell, Lenovo, and HP. I didn’t even consider HP on the last purchase. Not that the others options are great but never HP.
I’ve been twitchy about Lenova since they got caught selling computers with a rootkit that reinstalled crap-ware that users had uninstalled. A user would uninstall useless software from their computer, and when they rebooted, the rootkit would kick in and reinstall the bloatware.
The “rootkit”-style covert installer, dubbed the Lenovo Service Engine (LSE), works by installing an additional program that updates drivers, firmware, and other pre-installed apps. The engine also “sends non-personally identifiable system data to Lenovo servers,” according to the company. The engine, which resides in the computer’s BIOS, replaces a core Windows system file with its own, allowing files to be downloaded once the device is connected to the internet.
But that service engine also put users at risk.
In a July 31 security bulletin, the company warned the engine could be exploited by hackers to install malware. The company issued a security update that removed the engine’s functionality, but users must install the patch manually.
They had previously been caught selling computers with adware installed on them.
Earlier this year, the computer maker was forced to admit it had installed Superfish adware over a three-month period on new machines sold through retail channels. The adware had the capability to intercept and hijack internet traffic flowing over secure connections, including online stores, banks, among others.
Users were told they should “not use their laptop for any kind of secure transactions until they are able to confirm [the adware] has been removed,” security researcher Marc Rogers told ZDNet at the time.
It was thought as many as 16 million consumers and bring-your-own-device users were affected by the preinstalled adware.
since they got caught selling computers with a rootkit
Is there any large computer/phone vendor that didn’t? Tuxedo maybe, but they aren’t large.
No excuse, but preinstalled malware is more “common” than you think, and sometimes one of them is a rootkit/bootkit. (paid-for) bloatware is often not quality-checked; it’s handled similiarly to ad platforms.
When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.
So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use
However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone
Yes, because the #1 thing everyone wants to hear over and over is a voice saying “go to double u double u double u dot…”
This is the fucking 21st century if they could fix their shit on the internet they would have already done it.
Especially pisses me off when the only reason you’re calling them is because their website /portal / app explicitly went “you can’t do that here, call us”
Could be worse: You could be made to sit through aich tee tee pee colon slash slash double u double u double u dot…
Even better than that is Siteground’s absolutely abysmal support system.
In order to access support they force you to type your question into their chatbot first. This is not optional. It’s the only way to get support.
Fools that we are, we actually tried the solution the chatbot offered. This resulted in a good amount of time wasted looking for settings that didn’t exist, because the solution was total bullshit. They claim they’ve customized this thing to give helpful outputs, but it’s clearly just ChatGPT with a custom prompt.
When we finally spoke to an agent I pointed this out and they responded with the stock “You should always double check the output of AI” line.
DOUBLE CHECK WITH WHOM, YOU MOUTH BREATHING MORON? THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL FUCKING SUPPORT CHANNEL. YOU LITERALLY DIDN’T GIVE ME ACCESS TO ANY OTHER KIND OF SUPPORT UNTIL I USED THE CHATBOT FIRST, SO WHERE IN THE ACTUAL FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DOUBLE CHECK THE OUTPUT?
Is it with a customer service agent? Is that what you’re saying?! That I should ignore whatever it tells me, wait until I can talk to a representative and then do whatever they say instead? Because if that’s the case, WHY IN THE FUCK ARE YOU FORCING EVERYONE TO TALK TO THE BOT FIRST??!!!
Absolutely fucking asinine idiocy. Anyway, don’t use Siteground, they fucking suck.
You shouldn’t talk to customer support agents like that. They’re not responsible for the actions of the shitty company, and you are giving them a bad day for no reason.
Actually, the tough love approach can encourage them to find a job less damaging to the soul.
They don’t take such a job because they want to.
Jesus fucking Christ.
OK little Timmy, today we’re going to learn that sometimes people express things in their “inner voice”, but they don’t share those things in their “outer voice”.
And sometimes, later, they might share those “inner voice” thoughts with other people in an environment where it’s safe to do. But it doesn’t mean they have to express those inner voice thoughts to the person that they were thinking them about?
Does that help you understand better? Would youv maybe like a juice box and a lie down to think about it?
Yeah ran into that a month or so back with some service or other. Account was locked out, I told the prompt I was looking for an account unlock, I got to listen to “you can do most things by logging into your account at” for 45 minutes.
Online banking does this all of the time. It’s surprising how little you can actually do on their app, virtually every common banking task requires you to call them.
I had to call them to set up an automatic payment on my credit card from my savings account. Because I couldn’t work out how to do it on the app. I confirmed with the support agent that you can’t do it on the app.
I have found that if I yell or sound angry at the LLM prompt, I’ll get an agent faster than if I am a proper adult
If you swear or use certain words/phrases/tones there are absolutely some that put you into a higher priority queue. There are also some that immediately kick you into that queue the moment you swear, bypassing any info gathering and such.
I’ve had to use it for things like Verizon which absolutely expects the LLM to be able to verify your account, but their account verification was broken. Swear at it a little and suddenly the account verification is no longer needed.
It’s like a CEO heard a joke or saw a comic where this happened and thought it was the best idea possible. “If we add in waiting time for no reason then some of the people will hang up and go away.” It’s the same logic as making anyone who wants to close an account (such as Netflix) jump through 3 people and a million hoops.
Seriously, I moved to a town where Comcast has no Internet service, I looked it up on their online service tool. They STILL ran me through retention even after they looked it up and confirmed it internally, and I had to go through 10 extra minutes of some lady reading from a script before they’d kill my account, and then had the gall to ask if I wanted to complete a customer service survey.
I completely stonewalled the comcast retention stuff and I think I cut the entire call down to 5 minutes once I had someone on the line. I almost felt bad because she was clearly new and had a trainer with her. I just kept saying ‘just cancel the service’ every attempt to ask me something was met with ‘have you cancelled the service yet’
Lady I have anxiety about phone calls, I am not happy I have to make one. If I have to play this conversation through in my head 100 times then we’re following one of the scripts I have ready, not comcast’s.
I’ll remember that trick.
Tell Comcast youre going to prison and wont be able to pay for their service
I’ll remember that for next time.
Especially if you are planning to.
I assume every large company and bank (big or small) does this kinda shit on the regular
I self-solved my HP problems by never buying from HP again. I love by Brother printer. Don’t any of you dare quote stories about Brother enshittifying stuff in the replies (I will cry).
Brother has started selling printers that require an ink or toner subscription. I had to watch out for that last time I bought one.
Even if they get worse, I’m sure another brand will take their place.
For me the solution is simply to just not own a printer. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to print something in the last year. Anyway that’s what parents are for, their house is where you store things you only occasionally want.
But doctor… I am the parent.
Seriously, half the stuff that we print is coloring pages.
Even if they did it’s nowhere near the level of HP
Yet.
You know we’re gonna be talking to ai slop machines next. I’d rather wait 15 minutes for a human.
“an odd approach”
Otherwise known as lying.
Fuck these companies that refuse to provide customer support and try to force us on inadequate bullshit llm answers, if I didn’t want a solution I would use them.
One of the first things I do now before buying off a new site is see if they have anything resembling customer service and support policies.
Im so glad a company finally admitted that the “we’re experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume” was just bullshit.
