HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'
HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'
It woz The Reg wot won it... or maybe just common sense prevailed among management
They fixed the glitch
People who buy HP products get what they deserve.
I don't think that's fair. Plenty of people in this world do not know much about computers or the internet or anything in that area and just need a printer. So they go to their local big box store and there's the HP printers and they're a good deal, so they buy them.
Consumers do not get what they deserve when companies treat them like shit just because they don't have certain knowledge.
I fucking hate tech elitism. There's a difference between refusing to learn to use a browser and learning the ins and outs of hundreds of different computer companies. Dell isn't really any better and those are the two main ones in a lot of stores.
People act like knowledge is inherit, It is not. It is earned through learning.
Buy the ticket, take the ride
Printers are the devils work (made by HP).
But the docs are still easier to work with than some parts of Lenovos ThinkStations.At least HP has an override boot menu option)
Stop being a Stan for any company. Neither of them are your friend beyond paying for your salary. And even then they are kept at an arms length.
It was all about "Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve," and "taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies."
If you wanted customers to go online to self-solve, you'd write proper manuals, provide well-documented and granular error codes and allow people to run diagnostics on their own devices... By not providing either it's clear the warranty cost efficiencies they're talking about are people giving up on trying to resolve their issue and just buying a new one
And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.
It doesn't even make sense. One can have a voice bot with an LLM, if it's so bad. One can ask if the customer wants to get an SMS with an URL to support page. Asking them if they want to be sent to operators after that.
But just 15 minutes basic wait so that less people would reach operators - why the hell, I don't get it, how is it better than just waiting in queue when all operators are busy and not waiting when, well, not. If the operators are overloaded and perform worse - then allow bigger ACW times, more breaks, maybe hire more operators.
Especially for a computer hardware company one can script most support calls pretty unambiguously. They are not going to be helping out a grandma via phone when "Internet isn't working".
You're completely right, if the goal is good customer support and decent working conditions for the operators.
It's not. The goal is like 1rre said - make people get fed up and stop trying to get their stuff fixed, just buy a new one. Oh, and they could fire half the operators too, since less people would be willing to wade through the pile of shit to talk to them.
Money and profit, screw the rest.
HP has been a shitty company for decades. Why do people still buy things from them? They are dead to me.
I'm in IT. I get cold called by VAR trying to sell me HPE here and there. I tell them straight up I won't buy HP cause of their business practices.
There is literally no good corporate computer manufacturer anymore. Dell, HP, Lenovo, all not good.
There are decent companies for home laptops: system76, framework, etc...
But they don't have the support infrastructure necessary for many corporate IT departments.
And even in that list HP is dead last.
It's a company who makes them and their partners lots of money, any company you see pushing HP products is just as shady as them. They've been riding their brand recognition for at least a decade.
Then right before their EOL's they push all their old stock for pennies and suddenly everyone has a HP product and they don't complain for the most part cause they got them dirt cheap.
For me it was because I was a broke (ignorant) college student who bought the cheapest printer I could out of necessity
I want a fucking human who can quickly help me solve my issue. I don't want to spend hours looking through "could be" problems. If you manufactured the software then your engineers understand it... Your end users only know how to use it the way they need to use it not all the options and variables.
The ultimate answer:
They have been making these things for decades, they know how to make them better, they know how to make them more durable, they know how to making them even simpler to use and fix, they choose not to, for profit. That should be structurally discouraged.
Charge the manufacturers for the FULL, REAL environmental impact of shipping materials and end of life disposal of their products. Yes, that cost will be passed to the consumers, as it should be. It also rewards sale of more durable goods.
Lol at the notion that you'll get to speak to any engineer when your machine breaks. Best they can do is a call center in India getting paid minimum wage that follows a script and circles around a bit between them until you either give up or they RMA your stuff to feed you a bill later for repairs.
If you manufactured the software then your engineers understand it
Ah I see the misunderstanding, the engineers were sacked after they finished writing the code.
How about a bot that types slowly, so it can have time to consider what it's going to say? Or perhaps a web page with an "Analyzing issue" status bar that takes several minutes to complete, because computers just do better if they're given time to work on a problem?
"We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience."
LOL!
Technically they aren't lying: their subjective experience is much better when they don't have to deal with customers.
If cutting our tech support staff in half is what is needed to raise our stock price 1 cent and jack up my bonus then so be it.
"... so we can be sure to avoid ever actually implementing them."
The problem, as far as HP will be concerned, is the strategy was leaked to the public. If there was no leak there would have been no news, and no 'feedback'.
HP won't take this as a signal to not do the shitty thing. They'll take this as a signal to back off for now, and then try the shitty thing again later, but slowly and bit-by-bit, so there's no big news.
Start with a few minutes instead of 15, and make sure the calls don't appear in the call queue for staff to see. Then don't tell anyone you did it.
And voila, no leaks, no feedback!
That's politics, all big companies do politics.
Well yes, that's the point.
That's how we know exactly how this playbook goes, because we've seen it before.
The fact that all big companies are doing this doesn't mean that we should think any less badly of HP for doing it too.
Uhhuh. "Feedback", read: risk of class action lawsuits from everybody they tried stopping from reaching the support they paid for
HP is in no way alone in doing this. This is an industry standard. Call centers are critically understaffed and under supplied on purpose. Call centers do not generate income, and the more customers that reach an agent, the more the call center ultimately costs to operate.
You noticed we were doing it so we'll be more sneaky about it next time.
Upset employees who have to pickup the call after customer waits 15 minutes.
Yep, it's just evil to their own staff. It seems every time I have to call some call centre these days, when I finally get to a human the conversation starts something like "I've just spent 40 fucking minutes trying to get to talk to a person and I'm really pissed off. I know that's not your fault and I apologise in advance if I struggle to contain my frustrations while we talk. Now.."
HP listens to their support staff?
Oopsie daisy we got caught. Try again in six months when nobody is paying attention. Imagine the metric shit ton of this stuff that happens every day that nobody catches on to.
oh, it'll still happen now... just no '15 minutes' announced to callers.
it will be the actual honest estimated wait time, and more than 15 minutes during customary busy periods...
after they shred half, then another half, of their telephone support staff.
Just wait for something else that dominates the news and do it then, so nobody will notice. Very old trick.
“It woz The Reg wot won it.”
Did I have a stroke?
Allow me to translate from Chav: The Register first reported on this which created the feedback.
And specifically, a reference to It's the Sun Wot Won It, a headline in the Murdoch press, not-good-enough-to-be-toilet-paper tabloid rag The Sun, crowing that they had enough influence in the 1992 general election to secure a win for the Conservatives.
Just in case, it's a reference to the Sun newspaper "winning" the election for Tony Blair's New Labour government