- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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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.
I don’t deal with hardware much anymore, but I’d take Aruba over Cisco any day. But for everything else, yeah fuck HP.
I worked briefly for Cisco because they acquired my company (a much smaller competitor) to help eliminate competition. The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me (and everybody else from this smaller company) two months’ notice of the layoff and didn’t have us escorted out of the building or anything.
It’d be cooler if they did escort you out of the building but also paid 2 months tbh
Well, I was WFH at the time and they didn’t give me anything to do so it was effectively that anyway. And really they had given me almost no work to do for the four months prior to that - which of course is why I was not even the least bit surprised by the layoff. My severance was to the penny exactly what I would have gotten from unemployment, so it effectively meant I got unemployment benefits without having to pretend to look for work. Also, they randomly sent me a check for $6K that I have no idea what for (not PTO or sick time compensation) and I used it to buy a school bus. So overall I can’t really hate them too much. Years later I found out my mother had thought I was working for Sysco (the food supply conglomerate) instead of Cisco.
It’s my understanding their enterprise products are still good. It’s the consumer products which suck
I’m a HP reseller, but barely ( I might sell a half dozen servers a year as part of larger projects) it’s SO MUCH EASIER to deal with Dell tho. Quality has been good but not great for both for a long time.
Oh I was talking about laptops and printers and stuff. Don’t know much about servers
For me it was because I was a broke (ignorant) college student who bought the cheapest printer I could out of necessity
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
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.
And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.
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.
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.
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!
Uhhuh. “Feedback”, read: risk of class action lawsuits from everybody they tried stopping from reaching the support they paid for
You noticed we were doing it so we’ll be more sneaky about it next time.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience.”
LOL!
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.”
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.
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.
Won’t someone think of the shareholders!
Of course they didn’t leave any documentation because management said that writing it was a waste of time
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?
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.
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?
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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.
Just in case, it’s a reference to the Sun newspaper “winning” the election for Tony Blair’s New Labour government
