- 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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“influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve”
Corporate speakers should be paddled
Sounds like a great way to increase their adoption of a competitor’s product
Translation: “We’ve had our fill of screwing you around for today and invite you to cordially go screw yourself.”
When it comes to HP, just say no.
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.
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”
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.
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.
Haven’t found that one yet… mostly it’s either faster or just as shitty
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.
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?
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.
Could be worse: You could be made to sit through aich tee tee pee colon slash slash double u double u double u dot…
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.
Yeah, I think most new PCs are also Copilot PCs with the branding and the button, if that’s what you mean. I don’t really mind that. I only use Windows at work, and we can’t use Copilot because it requires a personal Microslop account now, and we’re not allowed to sign in with one (only the corporate Intranet account). I think some people do anyway; to me, it’s as bad as using Facebook/whatever social at work, because IT can see everything you do. And I have enough history with Microslop (Xbox as well) I don’t want to associate with my job. I leave my job at the door when I leave and I leave my personal/social life at the door when I go there.
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.
Not necessarily. Epson has good support in the enterprise area, but their toner is just as bad as HP’s. And don’t even get me started on Lexmark.
Again, their home stuff is a different story. But once you cross over into “lol business” things change.
Having run a couple support teams, 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.
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’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 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.
Nobody hates their customers like HP hates their customers.
the worst of it is, HP used to be fucking legit. their scopes and other tools were rock fucking solid for decades. then, came the 80s and 90s.
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.
HP support sucks. They wanted me to buy a support package to get a link to a driver. Like, fuck off.
HP is a garbage company. My laptops typically last until the hardware is well past obsolete, but not HP’s crap. My HP X360 laptop’s motherboard failed completely and the hinges just fell apart for the 2nd time. This POS didn’t last for 3 years of occasional use. Never again.
HP stands for “Hinge Problems”.
Years ago I called them to get an RMA on a scanner that had a fingerprint on the INSIDE side of the glass. They wanted me to disassemble it and charge me $70 for the knowledge on how to do so. Fuck HP.
Their sales reps that hang out at Microcenter would actually not stop talking to me. I literally walked past them and wouldn’t make eye contact. They followed me through the whole section. It wasn’t until I approached an actual MC employee and said, “I will never buy an HP product. Can you help me?” The HP guy still followed us while I bought another printer! Fuck HP.
capitalism is never about the product
Im so glad a company finally admitted that the “we’re experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume” was just bullshit.
“an odd approach”
Otherwise known as lying.
I assume every large company and bank (big or small) does this kinda shit on the regular
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.
