Misguided HP customer support approach included forced 15-minute call wait times
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HP should be required to reimburse everyone who was affected by the forced delay with the equivalent amount of the CEO's hourly rate.
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The boot?!? They probably got a nice bonus for the cost savings, then threw someone lower-level under the bus when the media caught wind of the issue. Executives only ever fail upwards.
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HP has literally the worst ideas in the industry - possibly in any industry. It's sometimes difficult to believe there are actually humans coming up with these ideas.
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Even by 'MBA logic' standards, this "yay! we're ranked #1 in support, what can we do to tank that asap?" seems idiotic
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In MBA-logic, there is no, "Yay! We're #1." Instead the logic is, "There must be money to be made by not being #1. In fact, Boo! We're #1.Money's being left on the table and we can't have that."
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The way I picture it is that tech support lines aren't made for people who know to try everything else first. Even with that being said, I don't think the people who do end up calling support look forward to it - they're willing to try anything to get their stuff to work. Which is why I personally think that those self-help options are mostly there as a distraction - some people will take the time to go through those steps to get everything working. Most of the time, it will not work. In the meantime, that frees up the phone lines a bit so they're not completely inundated - not that they care, apparently.
I think the bigger problem is that many times, the problem is something unique to a piece of equipment's environment - conflicting drivers, specific KB updates that silently brick installations - stuff that owner's manuals will not cover. A phone call might help with this, but it's going to be limited to both parties' understanding and willingness to try. Try talking an angry senior citizen through the process of installing KB-4079000 directly from the Microsoft KB Catalog.
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Pretty sure a majority of companies with sizable call center operations do this. I cannot remember the last time I called a corporate customer service line and did not hear "we are experiencing unusually high call volumes" regardless of the day or time.
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What that line is really saying is, "Go fuck yourself, we don't care about you at all" because if they are even remotely interested in customer service, they'd have already had all the metrics in place to staff call centers to increase staff for those peak times when their own fucking service history should tell them will happen. It's not at all like these things are unexpected nor can't be planned for.
They just don't give a shit.
I bought an HP printer once, around 30 years ago. Never, ever, again.
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I used to do phone support for Compaq back in the day. The vast majority of calls were people who didn't read the manual. I'd literally pull the manual and read it to them verbatim.
I'd get calls form people pressing paper against the monitor thinking that's how you fax. It's endless just how dumb people are.
The reason I was good at the job was I knew what questions to ask people. Which AI really isn't that good at so far.
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The concept of these are not bad, but they're by and large poorly thought out and largely just someone throwing ChatGPT at something. Realistically they're probably not going to have a lot to add that a good knowledge base search engine can't for expert users (which most people here probably are).
I'm not sure if they're really useful for inexperienced users, who probably should be the target of these assistant. It just feels often like an after thought that had zero effort put into it because some management demanded AI.
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So… HP’s actual error is admitting that keeping users on hold is a deliberate policy.
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Having done some time on the front lines in IT... Those FAQ's probably do solve a lot of problems, because there are plenty of people that it isn't obvious to.
This is of course the same reason why IT call chains often ask you to check to see if your computer is plugged in and the monitor turned on. While it is obvious, it also means numerous problems are solved by this simple step.
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On the flipside of this is when the companies don't give a support number anywhere, and make you jump through hoops on the online support before you can schedule for them to call you, but you get stuck in a loop because your issue sort-of but not-really fits into some of the online help's categories, so it keeps sending you to the same non-helpful help articles, before you finally figure out the magical incantation of just the right clicks and responses to get the online help throw up its hands and finally let you talk to a human.
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Companies like H.P. push people to website online help because they don't want to pay people livable wages to do customer service talking with customers over the phone If it's not online website help then you are forwarded to a person in India who speaks bad English.
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If the online support was better we would be much happier. The online support at all these companies is awful. The AI chatbot trained on your online support material doesn't improve the results at all. If companies want to shift more users to their online support then they need to heavily invest in their online support resources. Create metrics improve, improve, improve, update metrics, etc. Then a side-effect will be decreased call volume and overall savings. It won't happen quickly, which I suspect is the real problem. They need to show results of these changes in one or two quarters. This kind of change will take more than a year to show profits, and that is just way too long for a corporation to wait.
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If only there was a way to signal you were smarter than the average caller, and tried all the basic stuff already....
https://xkcd.com/806/
That comic is from 2010.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/806:_Tech_Support
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There is no reason why you couldn't set up that type of branching logic into an assistant, other than it would take a lot of work. Realistically building out detailed scripts and diagnosis trees for support is hard, especially because constructing clear and concise instructions on the fly is really hard.
Just dumping your knowledge base into ChatGPT takes little time.
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My favorite recent customer service interaction was being told I could leave my number and a quick voice message and the next available rep will get back to me. I select that option and was greeted with a simple "Sorry, we cannot process your request at this time. Goodbye." To the back of the line I went. At least my call was important to them...
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Translation: we removed the 15 minute wait from all our customer service documentation and forbade it from ever being discussed again (but we did not remove it from our call center PBX programming).
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Don't buy anything from HP ever. Encourage your employer to do the same. "Problem" solved.
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The issue is that a lot of people simply...don't, and if 90% of issues can actually be resolved by AI, there is a reason to do so. When done well, I don't even hate it. Sometimes I just need help finding an answer that an AI bot can do fine at. And I think most support reps can attest that said AI monkey could help many or even most callers.
Having said that, for people who have more complex issues (because they have tried to self-solve first), making it near impossible to speak to a human is infuriating. There are lots of times I am calling support because I need them to fix something they fucked up around. And a bot isn't going to do that, in fact all it does is frustrate me because I know I need to talk to an actual rep and it's just adding friction. That is the case here. It's intentionally adding friction, not actually making self-help desirable (and useful!).
The really annoying part is that at no point is the goal here to improve service. Its only to reduce cost of service to the company. If they can funnel off users to self-help - that doesn't make their customer support better. It just means they have less staff helping. I'd love to see how many systems have the "higher than normal call volume" message on more than 50% of the time. My guess? Most. And then it's just a lie.
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Honestly I think many companies across industries and sectors are trying to train us that calling them on the phone won't get us what we want
There's just a parade of ways that they seem to deliberately make the experience difficult and miserable that reflect this intent. You don't have to have tinny, annoying hold music interrupted every 7 seconds by a reminder that they have a website. You don't need automated data collection steps that are just repeated with a human anyway. You don't need to say "please listen closely because our menu options have changed" at every submenu
They know how to make a good customer service experience, it's not rocket science. Most businesses have chosen to make it horrible
There's just a parade of ways that they seem to deliberately make the experience difficult and miserable that reflect this intent. You don't have to have tinny, annoying hold music interrupted every 7 seconds by a reminder that they have a website. You don't need automated data collection steps that are just repeated with a human anyway. You don't need to say "please listen closely because our menu options have changed" at every submenu
They know how to make a good customer service experience, it's not rocket science. Most businesses have chosen to make it horrible
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Yeah, in the 2020s it's not even faintly surprising that a large company--let alone a tech giant--is deliberately ramping up wait times to get customers to just fucking hang up.
It is a little surprising that they fessed up to it, even with the shitty "we were just trying to help" corporate propaganda. I'm guessing something is going to get entered into a court record somewhere, so they know they can't just suppress it?
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Which I would be extremely open to, personally, if they actually gave me the tools to actually resolve my issues. But that's the problem. They don't bother doing that, either.
I recently spent several hours trying to resolve a client issue, where the only admin account for a 365 domain lost access to MFA and therefore could not log in. The MFA failure was on Microsoft's side, just to rub salt in the wound--the client had used Microsoft's own authentication app, which relies on a successful push from the server side. The 365 login was not pushing, so login was not possible.
If you call technical support, the only option you're given--repeatedly--is "open a ticket online." Neither requests for "operator" nor deliberate cursing (which AI agents are sometimes trained to respond to with escalation) were even acknowledged... And opening a ticket requires, guess what? You being able to log into the portal, that you can't log into in the first place, because the MFA isn't working.
During that couple of hours, I navigated ENDLESS Microsoft community threads with angry people having the same problem, endless "me too" comments on them all, and equally endless "call support" recommendations from Microsoft employees and "MVPs", all offering... The exact same number where a robot refuses to do anything but tell you to log into the portal and open a ticket there.
I finally managed to work around it by calling BILLING. If you call Microsoft's accounts receivable department, THAT can be escalated to a human, and that human is not even faintly surprised about it when what you need is actually technical support and nothing to do with billing itself.
The human in the billing department sadly told me that they couldn't actually connect me, "the team works on a callback basis only." It took "the team" two DAYS to temporarily nerf the broken MFA so that my client could log in and set up alternate MFA fallbacks as well as the mandatory Microsoft MFA.
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I can't speak for all of humanity, but if I'm calling a technical support line, it's because literally every other avenue of support has failed me. I am not in the habit of calling a stranger on the phone if I can at all avoid it.
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Another fine example of corporate innovation.
Seize the means of production and banish the empty suits that thought this was acceptable.
Seize the means of production and banish the empty suits that thought this was acceptable.
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...after the lengthy wait, finally a real person, then the very helpful; "hold on while I transfer you to the correct department..." - then the line goes dead... that's always good for a laugh or two.
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Ironically, good users who catch onto this tactic may start to pre-emptively call the support line as soon as they exhaust all options that are quicker than dialing the number.
Fuck, I'd do it even when I know how to fix the problem just to spite them for having the gall to waste my time when I actually need help.
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I have the impression lying is the new modern these days. Just lie. It is completely socially acceptable. All the important people lie their way out these days. Hard work and due diligence? That is not how you get things done in this world. Wake up! Want to make money? Lie your way to the top. Don't be a loser doing actual work. You'll end up as an insignificant middle class employee struggling to pay rent.
I always lie. Always.
(/S)
* Edit* spelling. Lie is a complicated verb in English.
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I won't say I knew about the 15 minutes in particular, but I thought we all knew this was happening. "Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed" sound familiar? My credit union used that when they started forcing us though through phone trees, and it had that same language despite literally being so new there wasn't even a menu to have changed from.
Every step of it is designed to get you to give up, get off the line, go do something else. They'll call you if they need something.
Every step of it is designed to get you to give up, get off the line, go do something else. They'll call you if they need something.
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I'm getting closer and closer to not bothering calling the tech support line either, and going straight to Billing instead. (See my rant about Microsoft, a few comments back.)
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"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."
This is bad journalism: Giving the benefit of the doubt to company that does not deserve it.
It's obvious that they're doing it to reduce live-person expenses. A lot of people don't know this, and will read your "tongue-in-cheek" opening incorrectly.
Call a spade a spade.
This is bad journalism: Giving the benefit of the doubt to company that does not deserve it.
It's obvious that they're doing it to reduce live-person expenses. A lot of people don't know this, and will read your "tongue-in-cheek" opening incorrectly.
Call a spade a spade.
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I love all the whining about crappy service. Anyone who has ever bought something for $5.00 less, while knowing the retailer or manufacturer provides inferior service, has helped contribute to where we are today.
And then the problem becomes how to get enough people to actually pay for better service such that someone will even bother catering to those willing to pay for it.
And then the problem becomes how to get enough people to actually pay for better service such that someone will even bother catering to those willing to pay for it.
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I had a zombie Verizon account that simply wouldn't die, despite repeated assurances over several months from many Verizon support agents that this time the problem would get fixed. What finally did work was simply not paying the monthly bill. I got an email with a number to call, explained the situation, and was forwarded to someone who actually fixed the problem. It’s always the money that actually matters.
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They were halfway decent before they bought out Compaq. Now? No thanks.
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"Wow, that's some great hold music, could you please put me back on hold? I'd like to hear it some more."
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