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cjs_ac 24 hours ago [-]
The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.
omcnoe 23 hours ago [-]
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see these exact same market dynamics at work in the mobile telco industry. Newer online only upstarts able to save on costs because they don’t operate a retail store you can visit to get help resetting your email password.
teeray 16 hours ago [-]
It’s always amazing going to these stores and seeing the support they provide for frequent “how do I computer?” questions. To me, this is like going to the water department because you need a new faucet on the kitchen sink. We make no such distinctions about who fixes what for purveyors of Internet services though.
dehrmann 22 hours ago [-]
One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue.
But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
neild 20 hours ago [-]
Mint (T-Mobile MVNO) has been great for me, $20/month/line and my one experience with international travel was good ($20 for 10 days). I used to be on Verizon and the quality of service doesn’t seem any worse while the price is dramatically lower.
SapporoChris 17 hours ago [-]
Mint works well until it doesn't. I travel a lot and use voice over ip(VoIP). One day I called and got an automated message that my account needed funds. It didn't, my annual payment was months away.
My call to tech support was the generic worst. He insisted there was trouble with my current cell tower and I should reboot my phone. (ignoring the fact that I was able to get automated message). I explained I was using voice over ip, but the tech support didn't seem to understand that technology. Perhaps it wasn't in the script. I was on the call for about 30 minutes and eventually gave up. Phone started working about eight hours later.
Previous issue was with their roaming in foreign countries, however with VoIP that hasn't been an issue for years. So, a couple problems in about eight years. I rank them as one of the best among the terrible options.
ericpauley 3 hours ago [-]
Insisting on saying VoIP to the Mint rep instead of WiFi Calling (the term used by Apple, Google, Mint, and practically everyone else) is asking for a bad time.
eru 22 hours ago [-]
> But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
If you are so paranoid, just get multiple SIMs? Most phones support that these days, especially multiple eSIM. And the plans are really cheap (at least where I live).
karlgkk 19 hours ago [-]
> Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers
They explicitly do, even among their own customers and plans. If you Google the carrier name plus QCI, you’ll find tables where people have documented, which plans are in which priority group
craftkiller 18 hours ago [-]
eSIM transfers are an absolute nightmare on T-Mobile. I recently did two of them and both times, the transfer started but never finished, so I ended up with no service on either device. That means no ability to call their support line and no ability to receive the confirmation SMS they use to verify you are the correct person. They also immediately permanently nuke your physical SIM card so the only way to go back to sanity is to purchase another $10 physical sim card or get one of the physical sim cards that you load eSIMs onto (I did the latter so it won't self-destruct every time I do a transfer).
1. They only do transfers through their native app, not on their website. To log in to their native app, they will do SMS verification. So I sure hope you are still logged in before they lose your eSIM and leave you with no service at all.
2. If you are able to get into their native app so you can access their tech support, their AI chatbot will flat-out lie to you and tell you that T-Mobile cannot send you a QR code to download your eSIM (even though T-Mobile's own website states that they can). If you ask politely for a human, it will resist. I've found "connect me to a human you worthless fucking bot" is the secret passcode to get a real human.
3. If you request they send you a QR code, some of their support staff will ignore that request and still try to initiate the transfer through their app, so clearly requesting the QR code is not a common procedure.
4. When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. They then generate the QR code for whatever EID they have associated with your IMEI number in their database, completely ignoring the EID number you sent them. They did this to me _three_ times. The only way I managed to break the cycle was I sent them an IMEI number for a phone that was never on their network so they'd finally listen to me when I told them my EID number.
I'm never buying a phone without a physical sim card slot again. There's nothing wrong with the eSIM technology but the carriers have decided to make it as miserable as possible. The hardest part about transferring a physical SIM is finding a paperclip.
joecool1029 3 hours ago [-]
> When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number.
Everything else you say is accurate but they do not require this, T-Mobile is the only major in the US that doesn’t match EID to IMEI. I know because I use a removable esim (esim.me) euicc with multiple phones. I have to read the super long eid off to support to activate it. I cannot activate service on this card with verizon or at&t as its eid doesn’t match to an imei for them.
craftkiller 3 hours ago [-]
I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not saying T-Mobile locks the EID and IMEI together. I'm saying their tech support will completely ignore any EID you send them and instead look up an EID in their database based on the IMEI you send them. If you manage to convince the tech support to actually listen to you and use the correct EID then yes, everything will work out fine and you'll be able to move the card across devices.
I was also using a removable esim (from jmp.chat) and they did this to me three times. Each time it went like this:
> Me: Please send me a QR code to download my esim. My EID is XXXXXXXX
> Them: Thanks for providing your EID, please send me your IMEI (the first time this was just a plain message, the 2nd and 3rd time they sent me a link to a form to submit my IMEI to them)
> Me: <sends them my IMEI>
<at this point, the first two representatives initiated a transfer through their app and told me to wait 2 hours and then the transfer would finish. I told them whatever automatic transfer they just initiated will not work and they _need_ to send me the QR code.>
> Them: What is your e-mail address
> Me: My e-mail address is XXXXX@XXXX.XXXX
and then they'd send me a QR code. I'd then attempt to download it to my jmp.chat esim and I'd get an error that the EID was incorrect. Then, I'd try using the QR code to activate the built-in eSIM on the phone with the IMEI that I sent them, and it would work, proving that they were looking up the EID for the IMEI that I sent them rather than paying attention to the EID that I started the chat with.
The 4th and final time, I sent them my Librem 5's IMEI which had never been on T-Mobile and does not support eSIM. They told me that the phone was carrier locked, I assured them it wasn't and explicitly told them "it is important the QR code is for the EID I provided you. The past representatives have ignored that, leading to the error message <pasted the error from EasyLPAC's logs that was something like EID is incorrect>". THAT time they finally listened and sent a QR code for the correct EID, which let me download the eSIM to my jmp.chat card. At that point I was able to move the card across devices without issue.
dghlsakjg 10 hours ago [-]
Wow. That really sucks.
As a counterpoint (not sure if this was t-mobile, apple, or both), I just upgraded from an iPhone 11 with physical sim, to iPhone 17 with esim.
All I had to do was hold the new phone next to the old one, and it just transferred the line over and deactivated the old sim automatically. I wasn't even in the US (so not even on their network), and it was stupidly seamless.
It sounds like t-mobile support has gone downhill. Last time I had to contact support was 2020, and it was really easy back then. I rarely had to wait more than 5 minutes to get a human, and I once had an issue escalated to the "executive resolutions" team and resolved to my satisfaction the day it was opened.
craftkiller 1 hours ago [-]
> Last time I had to contact support was 2020, and it was really easy back then
Looks like that was 2 CEOs ago (Mike Sievert in 2020 and Srini Gopalan in 2025) so one of them probably bears the responsibility for this decline.
So I guess Mike Sievert drove t-mobile into the ground?
joecool1029 3 hours ago [-]
Apple’s system mostly works. If you need to reissue an esim without being able to transfer from an existing device on T-Mobile though need to either call in and give imei or get past the chatbot and there’s a page text support can give you to enter details. I was never able to successfully use the shit t-life app’s manage esim option.
dv_dt 20 hours ago [-]
Ive been happy with US mobile - you can actually switch between their VZ backed network or their ATT backed network.
mey 22 hours ago [-]
Personally switched from VZW to Google Fi. It's on TMOs network. As you can imagine, when engaging with Google's support was hilarious when there was something I needed, but overall I don't miss Verizon and pay drastically less.
laurencerowe 21 hours ago [-]
Is Google Fi particularly cheap? Their normal prices seem to start at $35/month for 30GB of data which is more than Verizon's Visible plans at $25/month. (The current 50% off offer on Google Fi does seem a good deal though.)
I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
Sohcahtoa82 20 hours ago [-]
> Is Google Fi particularly cheap?
If you travel internationally, they're really cheap relative to everyone else who will charge you absolutely ridiculous roaming fees.
laurencerowe 19 hours ago [-]
I just buy local eSIM's online when I go abroad now. Lycamobile is usually good around Europe if you land in a country with them. Their UK and Portugal subsidiaries are £5 or €4 / month with 30-50GB in country including 12GB roaming in other European countries. Order before you go and get the eSIM QR code by email. But you must be in the appropriate country to activate.
The Google Fi plans with roaming are either $65/month (100GB) or $20/month + $10/GB. I often end up using quite a bit of data abroad.
verdverm 19 hours ago [-]
My Google Fi is $20/m for connectivity and then $0.01/Mb until I hit 6Gb ($80) at which point everything after is no cost. Most of my data is on wifi, so my bill rarely goes above $25
laurencerowe 19 hours ago [-]
I usually end up paying about $5/month, though that is a data only plan as I just use Google Voice for calls and use maybe a couple of gigs of data.
Having moved here from the UK where I was used to cheap mobile plans I just grate at how extortionate they are in the US.
rootusrootus 21 hours ago [-]
For those of us who have crappy coverage with TMO, Verizon themselves offer a much better alternative to their postpaid service, called Visible. It's pretty hilarious how much better of an experience it is, and you are on the same network.
throwaway27448 20 hours ago [-]
I haven't had any issues with tmobile coverage (that wasn't also a problem with verizon) in well over a decade now. Hell it even worked well in the dense hilly jungles of burundi. Verizon customer service was so bad before I switched I swore them off for life....
The single place I noticed verizon gets coverage and tmobile doesn't is three levels underground in a concrete parking garage.
laurencerowe 21 hours ago [-]
Coverage is very specific to your situation. I've had basically no coverage on Verizon in offices in the Bay Area where T-mobile worked fine while colleagues could only get Verizon at home.
piperswe 22 hours ago [-]
US Mobile gets you QCI8 (same priority as Verizon postpaid) when you're on the Verizon network with a 5G device, and they let you pay for QCI8 on AT&T.
mortenjorck 18 hours ago [-]
USM is the only MVNO I've seen that actually advertises QCI tiers. I had to look the term up when I was initially considering them, as I'd never even encountered it before. It was a major factor in finally feeling confident I wouldn't be giving up too much by leaving AT&T.
axus 22 hours ago [-]
I was able to transfer eSIM for a lost phone using their website, I think the online carrier had run into that issue before.
slumberlust 19 hours ago [-]
They're all fungible if you aren't addicted to your phone.
nitwit005 21 hours ago [-]
Those stores generally turn a profit eventually. A smaller company is just going to struggle to afford building out the stores and running ads to get people in the door.
tencentshill 21 hours ago [-]
Those startups eventually need legions of fools with which to easily part their money.
Clent 23 hours ago [-]
Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers.
The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
ssl-3 22 hours ago [-]
Centralizing support generally saves money.
There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city.
Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them.
When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone.
(That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
nebula8804 21 hours ago [-]
>it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city
I'd kill for the building in Denver. Instead I always get some extremely compressed voice connection in the Philippines.
massysett 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but Baby Bell would dispatch a technician to your house if needed.
xp84 22 hours ago [-]
No. In the case of cell phone carriers, the only times in the past 10 years I have ever darkened the door of a retail store is times when the carrier was too incompetent to let me get my problem solved another way. For instance, there was a time at AT&T where if you had acquired a brand new unlocked iPhone that needs eSIM, you needed to receive a physical piece of cardboard printed with a unique QR code on it in order to activate it successfully.
I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
array_key_first 22 hours ago [-]
With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
ryandrake 22 hours ago [-]
Some people just prefer going into a physical place and talking to someone in a face to face conversation they can understand. I’ll very rarely want to sit in a phone queue just to talk to “Jason” who has a thick Filipino accent sitting in a crowded support room talking through what sounds like a a 1kbps VOIP connection. And I’m never going to text chat an AI bot for help.
Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention.
Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option.
People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
22 hours ago [-]
20 hours ago [-]
anonymars 23 hours ago [-]
Similarly when layoffs hit and morale gets low, guess what caliber of employee is going to jump ship and which is going to stay?
gopher_space 22 hours ago [-]
Everyone knows morale is a dump stat... if you don't track consequences.
marcosdumay 22 hours ago [-]
Well, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.
gib444 23 hours ago [-]
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old.
The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)...
Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
LeifCarrotson 22 hours ago [-]
There is no breaking through it because those LLM replies are not tweaked for 5 year olds due to managerial decree, they're tweaked for the average callers to those support departments due to cold hard reality.
If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.
Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.
dwedge 22 hours ago [-]
Is this not begging the question that 99 out of 100 were wrong? This totally depends if the aim is the solve problems or to reduce support costs - which are not necessarily the same thing.
If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hold.
I have an issue today where a service accidentally cancelled my package but still charged me. I asked for it to be reinstated or refunded, and three times I got the same identical automated output pretending to be a person, the fourth attempt is simply a credit card charge back and a lost customer
sigseg1v 54 minutes ago [-]
I have a very similar issue where yesterday I found a company sent me to collections for not paying for an item that is paid for and I have the receipts and bank statements for. Trying to get the chat bot to drop the charge on my account is literally not possible, and I understand why, but why is it so excruciating to get in contact with someone to resolve this? The effort levels are totally disproportionate; they have an automated system that sends me emails and threatens me if I don't pay, but I cannot similarly have a 0 or 1 button process that removes that error.
BobaFloutist 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe the online FAQ/support flow should give you a one-time skip-the-line code that you append to the phone number or something.
lol768 21 hours ago [-]
One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
gib444 20 hours ago [-]
Hah, I've seen your posts on RailForums!
> One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
I get the feeling you wouldn't joke about this. I can't believe how amazing this is LOL. I /think/ I know which retailer...good to know!
> Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
Right!? I did L2/L3 support many moons ago and it was very much my job to keep an eye on PFYs to ensure they weren't dismissing interesting tickets.
nitwit005 21 hours ago [-]
While I haven't heard of that idea being implemented, I have heard of the support page you're looking at determine who you got routed to if you started a support chat.
progval 19 hours ago [-]
> don't know how to clear their cookies
Why do users even need to manually clear their cookies?
gib444 19 hours ago [-]
It fixes like 1% of problems but sounds plausible to probably 95% of the population. Hence why it's peddled so often.
gib444 21 hours ago [-]
Nah, that doesn't wash. I can understand a default initial response for 99% of callers (a verbal FAQ as it were), but I do not accept the lack of breaking through. That is because managerial decree has mandated cost-cutting and chosen not to provide any real customer support.
After I exhaust the L1 flowchart I expect some real support. I've done my bit to prove it, I expect them to reply in kind.
The reality is that companies have gone on aggressive cost cutting to maximise profits, and customer support is absolutely included in that.
What next? Shrinkflation is because 99% of people expect smaller portions?
They know getting to L2/L3 support increases costs. Eg applying a refund when legally required, delivering what was contractually agreed etc.
Also, the more we accept people are 'dumb' and dumb down our interactions with them, the dumber everyone will get. Do teachers not need to believe in the capacity of children, lest education totally go to hell?
johnisgood 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this honestly scares me.
wccrawford 20 hours ago [-]
I used to work tech support. Those lines are there because they work. In only 9 months, I had a few different people tell me they were pc repair techs and knew what they were doing, and I didn't need to do the basics.
I did them anyhow because the company said so, and I found that more often than not, it fixed the problem.
If I had sent that to second-level support without making sure of it, I'd have been written up.
So yes, they're trained to treat callers like they don't know what they're doing, because they often don't. Even if they claim to.
The best thing you can do is just go along with it quickly and get it over with, even if you've already done it. There's no way around it.
gib444 19 hours ago [-]
> I used to work tech support
Me too. Long time ago though. I get it.
But my problem and main point is that now L2/L3 doesn't seem to exist, or is way way harder to access.
When I did L1, I was trained to permit escalation. Now, it seems people are trained to gaslight people that actually nothing is broken and it's all their head.
Spooky23 20 hours ago [-]
I ran an enterprise help desk for a few years. I wasnt in the day to day, but would listen to calls sometimes. The reality is, dumb 5 year olds are often smarter.
We had a large (250k) workforce with a pretty wide variance in roles. We had probably about 100 people in the call center, although some of them did more interesting stuff too. It was a very good support organization with multichannel contact capabilities and really good, well paid staff.
Basically there was a barbell distribution with the lowest ranked people and highest ranked employees
being the worst. (Think attorneys and other special IC and middle managers. Executives had dedicated support and didn’t use this method.) The most expensive 20% of users make 80% of the calls. The high ranking ones were dumber to deal with and took more time, the low ranking ones called too often for dumb reasons but resolved quickly.
I cannot imagine the hell on earth the general public could be.
weaksauce 21 hours ago [-]
I was a programmer at a small company that had their programmers field tech support calls and there is a good reason they do this... most of the people calling in are dumb as rocks when it comes to whatever they needed help with... some called while driving for help that required you to be in front of a computer.
ceejayoz 21 hours ago [-]
> I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old.
That's quite reasonable on their part.
I do wish I could take a quiz to bypass it, though.
bityard 22 hours ago [-]
Have you tried saying "shibboleet"?
soopypoos 22 hours ago [-]
I'd rather die.
wat10000 19 hours ago [-]
At most places, 95% of the customers are dumb as rocks. And 95% of the support staff is also dumb as rocks. So they're conditioned to assume everyone calling in is an idiot, and it's very likely that whoever you're talking to is not equipped to understand what you're saying to try to convince them that you're not.
My favorite instance of this was with an ISP that rhymes with Bombast where it was very clear that the modem wasn't getting a signal. The lights indicated it, and I was also able to connect to the modem's internal monitoring and see that it wasn't seeing anything on the line. The support agent kept asking me to reboot my computer.
LtWorf 21 hours ago [-]
People suicided because of that, and the UK post office knew fully well it was their own fault.
While I tend to lean towards libertarian the reality is that "someone will fill the market gap and customers will leave" is largely a myth. Even without lock in or other reasons the market tends to be rather shallow with only a few choices. Maybe HP is the instigator but it largely signals to their competitors that "hey you can be abusive too". This creates a casual follow-the-leader collusion then everywhere sucks and there's nowhere to go anyway so why leave.
throwaway27448 20 hours ago [-]
To be fair, HP lost their competent customers a long time ago.
aworks 19 hours ago [-]
FWIW, I'm typing this on my sub-$500 HP laptop and it's fine. I would only call for support as a last resort, and I haven't needed to do that.
zombot 19 hours ago [-]
Which is still not enough punishment for a decision like this. But without adequate consumer protection laws abuse like this is to be expected.
iinnPP 24 hours ago [-]
I worked HP CS in Highschool and during my time there I created a HTML/JS replacement for a unbearably slow tree system that made a 10+ second network call every single question(often 20+ questions and a tree copy was required for notes). Mine was instant.
They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.
At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.
junon 23 hours ago [-]
Quasi-related but I did the same thing at RadioShack for inventory. It was a long process of scanning each product, looking at the scanner and manually verifying the price on the tag.
The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.
So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.
Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.
nubg 16 hours ago [-]
> understandably
why?
junon 16 hours ago [-]
I was running scripts on their PoS (EDIT: point of sale) terminals to hit an internal service. If I were the sysadmin at corporate, people like me would make me nervous too (even though I wasn't doing anything nefarious).
BobaFloutist 22 hours ago [-]
>my AHT flagged me
Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?
btreesOfSpring 21 hours ago [-]
Acronym use here to single being part of an in-group. It is one of the most annoying shift in tech language over the past decade. I partly blame it on all the certification testing that has popped up over that time frame.
It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
> over the past decade
You must be young. Do you not think there were similarly acronym infested tech speak in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s? All of those decades also had plenty of certification testing.
bobbob1921 20 hours ago [-]
This comment is so spot on, it’s also big in military circles, especially over past 15 years. It can even be said that frequent (over) use of acronyms is based in insecurity
batch12 21 hours ago [-]
This one is a call center metric. Similar to after call work or first call resolution. This one, I believe, is average handle time.
If you're not part of their industry, just look up the acronyms instead of getting mad. "Audience" is laughable, they are not posting solely for your entertainment.
And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.
wat10000 18 hours ago [-]
That highly prestigious in-group of call-center workers....
It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.
mjuarez 22 hours ago [-]
Average Hold Time
Zircom 20 hours ago [-]
Average Handle Time actually
creddit 23 hours ago [-]
If yours was instant, why would your AHT decline? Shouldn’t you be way faster? On many questions you would have saved over 3mins on network calls alone.
imzadi 23 hours ago [-]
I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.
iinnPP 23 hours ago [-]
The AHT value indeed went down 3 minutes below the average, which is generally a good thing so long as you are doing everything well still. All outliers get checked and mine was the lowest. I was honest about the tool, including that it was offline. Their supposed policy was no personal tools and as it was during "probation" (first 90 days in Ontario), they could fire without cause, and did, immediately.
ok_dad 16 hours ago [-]
A good business would have promoted you to the dev team so they could reduce that metric for everyone.
agumonkey 17 hours ago [-]
I've seen this in many groups. Every time I laugh thinking about private enterprise efficacy. Then I shed a tear. Distribution problem.
oofbey 23 hours ago [-]
AHT?
LordGrey 23 hours ago [-]
Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.
iinnPP 23 hours ago [-]
Average Handle Time
soopypoos 22 hours ago [-]
Assistant Head Teacher
fifilura 23 hours ago [-]
> made someone look bad
That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
iinnPP 23 hours ago [-]
It was offline.
MBCook 21 hours ago [-]
And making each click trigger a 20 second DB query doesn’t?
How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?
fifilura 17 hours ago [-]
If you prefetch all those options in the background, I bet the DB would be unhappy.
lambdaone 23 hours ago [-]
What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.
They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.
Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.
ryukoposting 23 hours ago [-]
It is staggering how much HP has fallen from grace. I don't think a lot of people my age even know.
If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell").
HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore.
The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor.
They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.
cogman10 21 hours ago [-]
That was basically entirely on Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and the board of directors. It's pretty similar to what happened to Boeing.
HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company.
Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.
ryukoposting 20 hours ago [-]
Ooooooh, there must be a story there. I think I get the same high from corporate horror stories that my wife gets from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
I yearn for the day that I'm in a stable enough career position to write about some of the shitshows I've seen.
cogman10 19 hours ago [-]
Not much of a story. Like I said, I was an intern so I mostly heard this stuff from my coworkers (it's been a while too).
My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off.
I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship.
Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day.
General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that.
The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to.
Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.
segmondy 21 hours ago [-]
Well, it's not the same HP. If there was ever a case that Ship of Theseus is not the same it's with companies. It just takes but a few replacement to get an entirely different company, mostly same people, same name, same business, completely different. Yet alone when the company has turned over everyone over decades, including customers. This is not the HP we knew.
tonyedgecombe 23 hours ago [-]
They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.
BobaFloutist 22 hours ago [-]
>Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates
They're not bad for $300-500 upgradeable Costco/Best Buy laptops, especially since Dell has deteriorated and Chromebooks exited their honeymoon period at escape velocity.
spl757 9 hours ago [-]
Back in the 90s HP LaserJet 4 printers were manufactured by Canon. I suspect that that is no longer the case.
agumonkey 17 hours ago [-]
Isn't this an unavoidable company pattern? Early on you go all in to prove your mastery. Then your reverse course to ramp benefits or something like that.
drewg123 23 hours ago [-]
I'll always despise them (and their Itanium) for killing the DEC Alpha CPU off after they acquired it along with Compaq.
dreamcompiler 22 hours ago [-]
Friend worked at HP in the old days before (as he put it) the company got "Carly'd."
lich_king 23 hours ago [-]
I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not providing it if the product is problem-free for 99% of your users.
Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.
There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.
But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.
tristor 19 hours ago [-]
> United?
FWIW, Airlines are actually great /if/ you're a frequent flyer. I get great service from United on the phone and did so previously from Delta, but in both cases I was a frequent traveler and so they automatically route your call into a better queue with better trained staff.
drstewart 22 hours ago [-]
Wow, other countries sound like utopia! Can you tell me how to reach RyanAir by phone and how long it will take? How about Evri? China Southern?
aboardRat4 21 hours ago [-]
China Southern is okay if you speak Chinese.
fancyfredbot 1 days ago [-]
Someone presumably pitched this idea within HP and other people agreed it was something they should try. I guess probably HP didn't put its best and brightest in charge of call centres but still, isn't that sort of amazing?
I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.
Macha 22 hours ago [-]
I’ve seen it pitched here even, with the idea that deflecting some call volume will make call centre jobs less hell. The thing it misses is that call center jobs are hell because they’ve used metrics to optimise to the minimum number of staff, and any reduction in average call volume will just result in the company cutting staff, so now staff still have the same workload but callers are XX minutes of waiting more frustrated.
whizzter 24 hours ago [-]
Optimizing the wrong thing, probably wanted to shave customer support costs by having lower call volumes, but those that need support probably were hanging onto the calls since nobody that can fix things calls support (so no savings) AND reduced customer satisfaction.
halapro 22 hours ago [-]
I think HP was absolutely right in doing this. How many times have you opened a GitHub issues only to come back an hour later with "nvm I figured it out" and close it?
The hope is always that you figure it out autonomously.
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
If offering free support is too expensive, then they shouldn’t offer free support, instead of externalizing the costs by wasting the time of every customer who calls.
Charge callers some small fee and refund it if it was a real issue.
halapro 3 hours ago [-]
Paid B2C support is a real tough sale. A lot of low-cost airlines don't provide support at all (if not in person), I guess because it's not practical. If costs could be covered this way, everyone could offer support. Even Google! And yet they don't.
ornornor 9 hours ago [-]
Or just accept that support is a feature of whatever junk you’re selling and build it into the price.
Instead of being actively hostile towards the naive idiots who gave you money for your junk of a product which you now refuse to even support.
archerx 24 hours ago [-]
Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were hoping people would just hang up and give up. This would save money in the short term but lose money in the long term but that’s what you get when the current quarter is all that matters.
Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.
ornornor 9 hours ago [-]
> Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Not at all, they say they’re “always looking for ways to improve customer experience” and just wanted to “encourage people to self solve” to increase customer satisfaction. /s
Foobar8568 23 hours ago [-]
Depending of the country, legislation (and changes in them), the waiting time might be taxed as well. So a way to recoup some little costs.
dfxm12 24 hours ago [-]
It depends what your goal is. If HP gets charged per call answered, then their goal is to minimize the number of calls they answer. If they see a most of their calls are like "my internet is slow" or the laptop won't turn on because it's not charged up, it's easy to see how this could be approved. Same thing if they've just spent a ton of money on some AI chat agent that they need to justify as well.
g947o 23 hours ago [-]
Marginally related:
I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions)
I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either need to wait till the next day, or bring it early in the day so that it can be done by the end of the same day.
That store somehow is closed for half of the year for no reason. The next closest store is about 20 minutes of drive away, with the same thing -- arrive early or wait overnight.
Meanwhile, these repairs are straightforward repairs at genius bar that can be done within about an hour, any time of the year.
I had similar experience with laptop repairs. Apple and Intel (NUC lines) were top tier, and I was able to get back my device quickly. Not so for other manufacturers.
Apple devices come with a premium price, but as my life gets more complex, I realize that my time is worth more than the money I save on the hardware.
ectospheno 22 hours ago [-]
Indeed. The older I get the more I optimize for my time spent over almost all other factors. I want to enjoy life more.
doubled112 22 hours ago [-]
The older I get, the more money I have available to optimize for time spent.
A man I worked with told me that eventually his entire toolbox was a VISA. He could fix just about anything, he just couldn't be bothered anymore unless it seemed like fun.
I didn't get it then, in my early 20s. In my mid 30s, with a couple of kids and a million other things to get done, shut up and take my money.
Android phones to tinker with became an iPhone that just works for years. 15 year old VWs turned into 3 year old Toyotas. Probably other choices I've made without realizing it too.
jqpabc123 1 days ago [-]
Just further cements HP's position as one of the most anti-consumer multi-national companies in existence.
alnwlsn 24 hours ago [-]
You would never suspect they once made some of the world's finest test/scientific equipment.
bombcar 24 hours ago [-]
I'd argue that their excellent test equipment and printers allowed this to happen; anyone who made generic shit would have been quickly killed by all the blunders they made.
StableAlkyne 24 hours ago [-]
They sort of still do!
It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
rnrn 23 hours ago [-]
No, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight.
HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
StableAlkyne 19 hours ago [-]
Interesting, had no idea they used to make proper lab equipment
anonymousiam 17 hours ago [-]
I've got two garages full of 80's and 90's HP lab equipment, and most of it even works. In that era, HP had the best hardware design/production capability in the world.
Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).
_ks3e 23 hours ago [-]
The spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).
23 hours ago [-]
pjmlp 23 hours ago [-]
And great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...
justin66 22 hours ago [-]
Those HPUX machines were hot!
No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.
pjmlp 19 hours ago [-]
Interesting, I used HP-UX across a few years, but never heard of heat moments that would require using an extinguisher on the server room.
justin66 18 hours ago [-]
I only ever heard of HPUX workstations catching fire. No idea about their servers.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
This was during 1999-2002 and 2004-2006, HP-UX 10.x and 11.
bell-cot 24 hours ago [-]
Rome once ruled the greatest empire on earth. Vs. look at the last few centuries of Italian history. Regression to mediocrity seems an inescapable part of human endeavor.
aurizon 1 days ago [-]
I love the way they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their actions
onetokeoverthe 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
closeparen 23 hours ago [-]
In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.
At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
halapro 22 hours ago [-]
That gets expensive fast. Most phone support tech is composed of average gents who are given a 60 minutes introduction to the system and wished good luck. So cheap, so many unemployed people to choose from.
mmooss 20 hours ago [-]
I've seen that option with other major vendors too. It's always worth the extra cost for a business - incidents' internal time to resolution, labor costs, and downtime (which impact user productivity) can drop dramatically.
It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.
vjvjvjvjghv 23 hours ago [-]
American companies seem to increasingly hate their own customers. Add random fees, make products worse and provide terrible support. In a functioning market small competitors would take away the business of the big players but with the lack of monopoly enforcement they just buy their competition. Not sure where this is leading but it's not a good trend.
laughing_man 23 hours ago [-]
HP has plenty of competition. What they're doing is suicidal.
kykat 22 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't know who is still buying HP products, haven't seen one around me in years, probably just clueless people walking into a store and thinking "I've heard this name before"
ornornor 9 hours ago [-]
Corporates. I see so many HP monitors, laptops. I guess their leasing terms are good, financially?
vjvjvjvjghv 20 hours ago [-]
My employer buys HP products
xg15 23 hours ago [-]
> Some HP workers were reportedly unhappy with the mandatory hold times, with an anonymous “insider” in HP’s European operations reportedly telling The Register, per its Thursday report: “Many within HP are pretty unhappy [about] the measures being taken and the fact those making decisions don’t have to deal with the customers who their decisions impact.”
Sounds to me like some customers who did get through after the 15 minutes then complained about the wait times to workers, which means the workers had to lie about the cause.
imzadi 23 hours ago [-]
As someone who has worked in a call center, it's not just that they complain, but they complain a lot and become much more difficult to work with. A customer who has been on hold for a long time can take twice as long to resolve because they spend so much time complaining and refusing to do what you ask them to do.
duskdozer 23 hours ago [-]
Wow, you mean to say intentionally pissing off people who are already probably pissed off makes them more difficult to work with? That doesn't sound right.
temporallobe 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah it’s almost like purposely frustrating people has negative consequences, which HP completely overlooked.
Macha 22 hours ago [-]
HP didn’t care, that was a problem for the low level support staff and the customers, not whatever exec was hoping to show reduced call volumes -> reduced staffing levels -> savings.
darth_avocado 22 hours ago [-]
The fact that I’m calling an HP support line automatically means I’m annoyed. Keeping me waiting for 15 mins will only leave me inflamed. I have better emotional regulation but dealing with customer service sometimes pushes me to the “being assertive but polite” phase, which a lot of people will just skip. And for the workers, there’s only so much abuse you can take in a day.
petterroea 7 hours ago [-]
I have to admit i solve some support cases similarly. If I get questions about what seems to be a trivial thing I tend to wait a while with responding because most of the time it solves itself or the user discovered the plug was unplugged.
To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing
silexia 28 minutes ago [-]
A company that behaves like this should never be purchased from again.
dsr_ 24 hours ago [-]
"Best available laptop support" apparently means 18/30 or 12/20.
Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>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.”
>Even if HP’s telephone support center wasn’t busy, callers would reportedly hear: We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.
i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. my isp does the exact same thing with basically the same wording. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing high call volumes right now. but hey, did you know you can do lots of stuff on the website? go to the website. please use the website".
i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.
sharkweek 24 hours ago [-]
There’s no doubt this is true in my mind.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
philipallstar 1 days ago [-]
I think it is a common practice, and another I think will be just a static set of times that they play the "higher than average call volumes" message, rather than anything dynamic. I think call centre stuff is incredibly basic, even though the domain isn't that complicated.
Symbiote 24 hours ago [-]
It can't be that complicated.
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
jerf 21 hours ago [-]
All call centers are actually located in Lake Wobegon, where all the call wait times are above average.
Even in my internal company tech support line they play that "higher than expected call volumes" message, but their website also has counter on it that tells you just how many people are on hold and even when it is just one (me) it plays that message.
bombcar 24 hours ago [-]
The only ones I believe are the ones that tell you the estimated wait time or number ahead of you (most of which offer to call you back).
It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
InitialLastName 1 days ago [-]
Easy for that to be true: just set your expectations to zero.
vjvjvjvjghv 23 hours ago [-]
"i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. "
Health insurance does this for sure. From what I have seen I am convinced they have sophisticated systems to frustrate patients and providers until they give up.
voakbasda 1 days ago [-]
Did they admit to it? Or get caught?
salawat 1 days ago [-]
>i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. my isp does the exact same thing with basically the same wording. "sorry, high call volumes right now. but hey, did you know you can do lots of stuff on the website? go to the website. please use the website".
Look up Erlang numbers for call centers. We absolutely know how to calculate required reps for a desired queue dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
carefulfungi 23 hours ago [-]
Wait time is calculable; but you need an accurate forecast to staff and schedule. When I last worked in this space, forecasts were generated down to 15m granularity and agent work schedules (hours, break times, etc.) were derived from those forecasts.
I wonder how these systems work now...
miki123211 23 hours ago [-]
What if you get a large number of people calling at very particular times? E.G. what if you're getting far more calls at 09:00 than at 09:15? You can't hire agents just to handle a 15-minute surge.
Erlang's model assumes that the world is static or at least predictable; it doesn't take into account things like the superBowl, a hurricane cancelling 90+% of flights from a major airport, or a much-larger-than-usual number of customers trying to cancel because of a previously-confidential price increase now being publicly announced.
sdwr 19 hours ago [-]
Baseline demand affects the numbers much more than the unpredictable spikes do. You can come up with edge cases if you like, but the reality is that it all averages out pretty well with large volume.
ryukoposting 23 hours ago [-]
My first thought was "wow, those assholes."
But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?
tiagod 22 hours ago [-]
Many call centers have these privacy messages that play before you're actually put on hold. Just use the same feature with a 15min of waiting music.
ryukoposting 20 hours ago [-]
Ah, so that the music changes and/or clips when you jump into the call queue. That way, you know you just got mishandled for 15 minutes. Diabolical.
f_devd 23 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't be surprised if they have their own internal PBX system with a SIP trunk
ryukoposting 22 hours ago [-]
Sigh. VoIP makes everything less interesting.
21 hours ago [-]
justin66 22 hours ago [-]
I mean, any system has the ability to play a message before putting the call into a queue. Make the message fifteen minutes of muzak…
Steve16384 23 hours ago [-]
I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them. People want their problem fixed as quickly as possible, no-one wants to call a call centre.
delecti 22 hours ago [-]
I would actually expect support calls to be more bimodal between customers who use them as a last resort or first resort. If I'm calling support for something then I have probably already tried everything within my power. But there are absolutely people who will call as the first step, for a variety of reasons (maybe they're too technologically illiterate to even approach the problem, or maybe they feel like being a customer entitles them to technical support, which isn't totally unjustified).
Sohcahtoa82 17 hours ago [-]
> I would imagine that most people who call are doing so because the "online help" can't help them.
Based on the anecdata I have, this is very false.
My brother used to work tech support for X-Box Live. He said 80% of his calls were for password resets, something anybody could self-service in less time than it takes to find the customer support phone number.
Sure, there were cases where they no longer had access to the original e-mail address on the account, or cases where he was sure someone was trying to social engineer their way into someone else's account by claiming a forgotten password, but generally, he'd just trigger the password reset e-mail and the customer was able to reset their password.
At one point, he tried going off-script to tell people to select the "Forgot Password" option and walk them through the self-service, but he got in trouble for it.
jmull 23 hours ago [-]
“improve customer tech support”
That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.
There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)
ta9000 4 hours ago [-]
Like Kevin Costner, I’m surprised that HP keeps getting work.
ornornor 9 hours ago [-]
> We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience.
What a joke.
Anyway most of us already know to steer well clear of anything HP branded. It’s not the HP we remember from years past. Their junk is unreliable and they apparently have no interest in customer support.
I also love it when I spent ten minutes trying to locate the customer support line number (that is usually well hidden) for a recorded voice message reminding me that they have a website with the most generic answers to the most generic problems which I don’t have right now. Do you really think I’d be wasting my time going through your idiotic customer service number if I had found your generic answer in the FAQ helpful?
There is a special place in hell for the MBAs imagining new ways to maw everyone’s lives miserable.
What if I told you that customer support is a marketing expense?
eviks 24 hours ago [-]
> and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative
But you don't have those as a real alternative! Yes, you do have some "digital", but it's of the same awful quality as this mandatory 15min rule.
bombcar 24 hours ago [-]
The main problem is that once someone has made the decision to call, they've made their decision - a 15 minute hold isn't going to bother them much, and they certainly aren't going to do anything but sit there holding the phone.
If, instead, they had said "we'll call you back in about 15 minutes" and at the same time sent an email with chat/self help options it might have worked, because then you DO have 15 minutes to dick around.
kevinpet 22 hours ago [-]
I'm mostly a libertarian, but claiming "we are experiencing higher than normal call volumes" when you aren't should put you in jail for fraud.
inetknght 13 hours ago [-]
100% this.
fhn 23 hours ago [-]
I'm sure HP is bad but look at Nvidia's support forums. Most questions go unresolved but the close it after 14 days of inactivity and mark it resolved.
vladde 21 hours ago [-]
my parking space company has a variant that if you call in, you can choose to be called back at a later point.
what they don't tell you is that they will call you back after 4pm.
you don't keep your place in the queue. the first time around i expected to be called back within an hour, and ended up expecting a call "any minute now" the whole day.
bilekas 13 hours ago [-]
My god this is comic book villain level of business behaviour. Honestly whoever comes up with these decisions needs an exorcism.
canucker2016 23 hours ago [-]
Do HP and Boeing recruit from the same candidate pools/train using the same employee manuals???
I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.
bitwize 22 hours ago [-]
Hewlett-Packard split into two companies some years back: HP Inc. which handles the consumer PC and printer business; and Hewlett Packard Enterprise which handles all their server and enterprise stuff, and consulting.
Footnote7341 17 hours ago [-]
It is technically possible for mandatory 15 minute support call wait times to increase total user happiness by lowering average wait time in the queue.
midtake 17 hours ago [-]
Not if un-happiness compounds over time spent in a hold queue, and instant responses produce asymptotically incalculable happiness.
corvad 17 hours ago [-]
Won't this just cause more issues with customer server agents. Like I would assume more people would be annoyed once they get an agent.
Night_Thastus 20 hours ago [-]
I am so frustrated that every company in the world seems to treat user support as a tax that they must must MUST eliminate at all costs.
Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away.
Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it.
But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?
caderosche 22 hours ago [-]
In the long run, your customer's best interest aligns with your own best interest. Unless customer support costs were going to bankrupt HP, I think causing customers pain can only harm them.
LogicFailsMe 17 hours ago [-]
I have a Ford EV and a local Ford dealer refused to do warranty work on it because I didn't buy it there.
chrismorgan 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Won’t be true for everyone, but if I’m ringing, it’s because the digital self-solve solution didn’t work. Which happens ridiculously often.
Right now, I’m struggling with working out how to return a laptop keyboard¹ on Amazon (India). They say you can return it, but when you try, it only offers you a “chat now” button², and the bot eventually reveals it can only help with troubleshooting, and suggests you try other options, and here’s how you can escalate to a human, and… they’re both just a link back to the start of the support system, which no longer mentions any phone number or other way of contacting a human.
And this is hardly abnormal. So many self-serve systems are just broken, and it feels to me like it’s happening increasingly often.
—⁂—
¹ For an ASUS GA503QM. Among other issues, Space/f/j activate well past the click, Space doesn’t activate at all if pressed at the ends, and it’s 2KRO with horrific ghosting—typing “you” will activate F11 most of the time, “he ” gets a spurious N, and mashing the keyboard will put the laptop to sleep (which doesn’t even make sense) among other key-pressed-state-poisoning things (though that part could be a software issue). This is particularly insulting as the original is NKRO. All up, it’s utterly unfit for purpose (the Space key is bad enough that even a hunt-and-pecker would probably notice), and the worst new keyboard I have ever encountered, by a significant margin, barring those dumb roll-up ones twenty years ago (they don’t exist any more, right? Right?).
² This isn’t true on all products: I ordered a battery at the same time, and they’ll let me return that without fuss. Which I will probably do, because despite being advertised and labelled as 5675 mAh like the original, it reports a design capacity of 4800 mAh. Straight up counterfeit/fraud. Sigh. So it’s <40% better than my five-year-old battery, instead of >60% better.
daft_pink 22 hours ago [-]
Another mandatory wait time that’s annoying, Target. If you do driveup and you don’t tell them you’re coming, they literally have an software based wait time where you have to stare at the phone and wait for literally no reason.
The software could just add you to a queue and it could wait longer, but instead they make you watch the software do a countdown before you can ask for your order.
Havoc 22 hours ago [-]
Mandatory wait times is an insane concept anyway
everyone 17 hours ago [-]
Just curious has anyone ever contacted customer support in the past decade and not gotten the message saying their call volume is high atm and thus the wait will be "longer than average"?
red_admiral 24 hours ago [-]
If you're the customer support hotline, that's shitty practice.
On the other hand, if you're setting up an asshole filter (https://mrsteinberg.com/the-asshole-filter/), deliberately waiting a while before replying can be part of "chaotic good" tactics. You use my private email for something that has an official org process that we MUST use, per policy? It'll take me several days to reply, and then I'll ask you to use the official process anyway.
If you're setting up an asshole filter for your customers on the official support hotline, we used to call that "AITA?"
everdrive 24 hours ago [-]
My routine is that I curse at the voice bot and treat it really poorly and berate it, but then I'm really calm, polite, and professional with the real person I end up talking to. In the vast majority of cases, yelling a person is both rude in a strict moral sense, but also usually counterproductive even when viewed through a totally selfish lens.
Some CIO thought it would be great to get rid of our local in office IT team and replaced them with a multi million contract with HP to use their “tier 1” support. Their service was absolute garbage. But the CIO got a fat bonus check for the “cost savings”
hedgehog 23 hours ago [-]
After years of good experiences I'm pausing buying any more HP hardware. My recent Z series desktop was mis-assembled and customer service getting it resolved was atrocious, so incredibly bad it dissuaded me from even trying a replacement. I don't know what happened over there.
waynesonfire 18 hours ago [-]
All the sudden it's a bad idea now that you can have people talk to a chat bot for 15 minutes.
xvxvx 22 hours ago [-]
Sound terrible but they’ve probably tried everything imaginable to reduce their call volume and weed out the lazy folk who could just read their website. Call centers are expensive.
kylehotchkiss 21 hours ago [-]
It's OK their customers can all just upgrade to MacBook neos
jgbuddy 23 hours ago [-]
This is unfortunately how companies die
josefritzishere 23 hours ago [-]
Wait 'till you hear about their printers.
23 hours ago [-]
kotaKat 23 hours ago [-]
(2025)
I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead episode Tech Support. Why the hell would those two dolts be allowed anywhere near a headset they picked up?
"See, Hamid: our goal is to help the customers - of course - but if we're on the phone too long, we don't make any money. We go out of business - and then what will the customers do?"
itopaloglu83 23 hours ago [-]
I think HP continues to see the real problem as getting caught, just like a liar isn't someone who lies, but lies and also gets caught.
metalman 15 hours ago [-]
to simplify things I am abandoning any technology that gives me grief, or hireing local profesionals to handle if there is any advantage in useing the technology.
the flip side is that I am focusing on my real world abilities to manualy design and build things that those with technology and training struggle with sometimes,as all the technology in the world wont do 3d visualisations as fast as a brain that then can run one of the pen plotters it has on standby.
ACV001 19 hours ago [-]
the title spews evil
tristor 23 hours ago [-]
My experience with customer support with every major company has always been a miserable one. The fundamental problem from my perspective is that if I've decided to call support that means I've already exhausted any other alternatives, and most likely my issue is one that explicitly requires human intervention because I've found myself wedged into a crack in the self-serve systems. I'm not particularly bothered by waiting 15 minutes, but what pisses me off the most is that when I finally do get a person they're also not empowered to do anything except read to me from a script that is word-for-word identical to the documentation on the website which was written by Legal instead of someone technically competent.
What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process.
Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access.
Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.
adrian_b 20 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, my experience with customer support at various companies matches exactly your description.
Having heard many other similar stories, I assume that this is really how nowadays typical customer support is, so anything else, if such a thing exists, is a rare exception.
FiatLuxDave 19 hours ago [-]
I used to be the top-level support escalation at a company, and I made sure to brief all the tier-1 support personnel to escalate directly to me any call using "shibboleet" Sadly no one ever used it.
The company had "Nuclear" in the name, and our average customer had at least a masters in physics, so maybe not the typical support situation. But in at least one case, it has been a real thing. It doesn't work at AT&T and Spectrum, I've tried.
jefftrebben 20 hours ago [-]
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ryguz 22 hours ago [-]
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techpulse_x 23 hours ago [-]
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hellmar 23 hours ago [-]
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adolph 23 hours ago [-]
Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck?
But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
My call to tech support was the generic worst. He insisted there was trouble with my current cell tower and I should reboot my phone. (ignoring the fact that I was able to get automated message). I explained I was using voice over ip, but the tech support didn't seem to understand that technology. Perhaps it wasn't in the script. I was on the call for about 30 minutes and eventually gave up. Phone started working about eight hours later.
Previous issue was with their roaming in foreign countries, however with VoIP that hasn't been an issue for years. So, a couple problems in about eight years. I rank them as one of the best among the terrible options.
If you are so paranoid, just get multiple SIMs? Most phones support that these days, especially multiple eSIM. And the plans are really cheap (at least where I live).
They explicitly do, even among their own customers and plans. If you Google the carrier name plus QCI, you’ll find tables where people have documented, which plans are in which priority group
1. They only do transfers through their native app, not on their website. To log in to their native app, they will do SMS verification. So I sure hope you are still logged in before they lose your eSIM and leave you with no service at all.
2. If you are able to get into their native app so you can access their tech support, their AI chatbot will flat-out lie to you and tell you that T-Mobile cannot send you a QR code to download your eSIM (even though T-Mobile's own website states that they can). If you ask politely for a human, it will resist. I've found "connect me to a human you worthless fucking bot" is the secret passcode to get a real human.
3. If you request they send you a QR code, some of their support staff will ignore that request and still try to initiate the transfer through their app, so clearly requesting the QR code is not a common procedure.
4. When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. They then generate the QR code for whatever EID they have associated with your IMEI number in their database, completely ignoring the EID number you sent them. They did this to me _three_ times. The only way I managed to break the cycle was I sent them an IMEI number for a phone that was never on their network so they'd finally listen to me when I told them my EID number.
I'm never buying a phone without a physical sim card slot again. There's nothing wrong with the eSIM technology but the carriers have decided to make it as miserable as possible. The hardest part about transferring a physical SIM is finding a paperclip.
Everything else you say is accurate but they do not require this, T-Mobile is the only major in the US that doesn’t match EID to IMEI. I know because I use a removable esim (esim.me) euicc with multiple phones. I have to read the super long eid off to support to activate it. I cannot activate service on this card with verizon or at&t as its eid doesn’t match to an imei for them.
I was also using a removable esim (from jmp.chat) and they did this to me three times. Each time it went like this:
> Me: Please send me a QR code to download my esim. My EID is XXXXXXXX
> Them: Thanks for providing your EID, please send me your IMEI (the first time this was just a plain message, the 2nd and 3rd time they sent me a link to a form to submit my IMEI to them)
> Me: <sends them my IMEI>
<at this point, the first two representatives initiated a transfer through their app and told me to wait 2 hours and then the transfer would finish. I told them whatever automatic transfer they just initiated will not work and they _need_ to send me the QR code.>
> Them: What is your e-mail address
> Me: My e-mail address is XXXXX@XXXX.XXXX
and then they'd send me a QR code. I'd then attempt to download it to my jmp.chat esim and I'd get an error that the EID was incorrect. Then, I'd try using the QR code to activate the built-in eSIM on the phone with the IMEI that I sent them, and it would work, proving that they were looking up the EID for the IMEI that I sent them rather than paying attention to the EID that I started the chat with.
The 4th and final time, I sent them my Librem 5's IMEI which had never been on T-Mobile and does not support eSIM. They told me that the phone was carrier locked, I assured them it wasn't and explicitly told them "it is important the QR code is for the EID I provided you. The past representatives have ignored that, leading to the error message <pasted the error from EasyLPAC's logs that was something like EID is incorrect>". THAT time they finally listened and sent a QR code for the correct EID, which let me download the eSIM to my jmp.chat card. At that point I was able to move the card across devices without issue.
As a counterpoint (not sure if this was t-mobile, apple, or both), I just upgraded from an iPhone 11 with physical sim, to iPhone 17 with esim.
All I had to do was hold the new phone next to the old one, and it just transferred the line over and deactivated the old sim automatically. I wasn't even in the US (so not even on their network), and it was stupidly seamless.
It sounds like t-mobile support has gone downhill. Last time I had to contact support was 2020, and it was really easy back then. I rarely had to wait more than 5 minutes to get a human, and I once had an issue escalated to the "executive resolutions" team and resolved to my satisfaction the day it was opened.
Looks like that was 2 CEOs ago (Mike Sievert in 2020 and Srini Gopalan in 2025) so one of them probably bears the responsibility for this decline.
2024 might have been the start of forcing us to fight with toasters: https://www.t-mobile.com/news/business/t-mobile-launches-int...
and 2024 seems to also be when they locked down their esim transfer process: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1cnphk4/android_es...
So I guess Mike Sievert drove t-mobile into the ground?
I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
If you travel internationally, they're really cheap relative to everyone else who will charge you absolutely ridiculous roaming fees.
The Google Fi plans with roaming are either $65/month (100GB) or $20/month + $10/GB. I often end up using quite a bit of data abroad.
Having moved here from the UK where I was used to cheap mobile plans I just grate at how extortionate they are in the US.
The single place I noticed verizon gets coverage and tmobile doesn't is three levels underground in a concrete parking garage.
The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city.
Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them.
When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone.
(That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
I'd kill for the building in Denver. Instead I always get some extremely compressed voice connection in the Philippines.
I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention.
Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option.
People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)...
Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.
Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.
If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hold.
I have an issue today where a service accidentally cancelled my package but still charged me. I asked for it to be reinstated or refunded, and three times I got the same identical automated output pretending to be a person, the fourth attempt is simply a credit card charge back and a lost customer
Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
> One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
I get the feeling you wouldn't joke about this. I can't believe how amazing this is LOL. I /think/ I know which retailer...good to know!
> Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
Right!? I did L2/L3 support many moons ago and it was very much my job to keep an eye on PFYs to ensure they weren't dismissing interesting tickets.
Why do users even need to manually clear their cookies?
After I exhaust the L1 flowchart I expect some real support. I've done my bit to prove it, I expect them to reply in kind.
The reality is that companies have gone on aggressive cost cutting to maximise profits, and customer support is absolutely included in that.
What next? Shrinkflation is because 99% of people expect smaller portions?
They know getting to L2/L3 support increases costs. Eg applying a refund when legally required, delivering what was contractually agreed etc.
Also, the more we accept people are 'dumb' and dumb down our interactions with them, the dumber everyone will get. Do teachers not need to believe in the capacity of children, lest education totally go to hell?
I did them anyhow because the company said so, and I found that more often than not, it fixed the problem.
If I had sent that to second-level support without making sure of it, I'd have been written up.
So yes, they're trained to treat callers like they don't know what they're doing, because they often don't. Even if they claim to.
The best thing you can do is just go along with it quickly and get it over with, even if you've already done it. There's no way around it.
Me too. Long time ago though. I get it.
But my problem and main point is that now L2/L3 doesn't seem to exist, or is way way harder to access.
When I did L1, I was trained to permit escalation. Now, it seems people are trained to gaslight people that actually nothing is broken and it's all their head.
We had a large (250k) workforce with a pretty wide variance in roles. We had probably about 100 people in the call center, although some of them did more interesting stuff too. It was a very good support organization with multichannel contact capabilities and really good, well paid staff.
Basically there was a barbell distribution with the lowest ranked people and highest ranked employees being the worst. (Think attorneys and other special IC and middle managers. Executives had dedicated support and didn’t use this method.) The most expensive 20% of users make 80% of the calls. The high ranking ones were dumber to deal with and took more time, the low ranking ones called too often for dumb reasons but resolved quickly.
I cannot imagine the hell on earth the general public could be.
That's quite reasonable on their part.
I do wish I could take a quiz to bypass it, though.
My favorite instance of this was with an ISP that rhymes with Bombast where it was very clear that the modem wasn't getting a signal. The lights indicated it, and I was also able to connect to the modem's internal monitoring and see that it wasn't seeing anything on the line. The support agent kept asking me to reboot my computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.
At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.
The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.
So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.
Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.
why?
Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?
It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...
And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.
It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.
That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?
They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.
Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.
If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell").
HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore.
The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor.
They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.
HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company.
Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.
I yearn for the day that I'm in a stable enough career position to write about some of the shitshows I've seen.
My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off.
I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship.
Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day.
General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that.
The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to.
Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.
They're not bad for $300-500 upgradeable Costco/Best Buy laptops, especially since Dell has deteriorated and Chromebooks exited their honeymoon period at escape velocity.
Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.
There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.
But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.
FWIW, Airlines are actually great /if/ you're a frequent flyer. I get great service from United on the phone and did so previously from Delta, but in both cases I was a frequent traveler and so they automatically route your call into a better queue with better trained staff.
I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.
The hope is always that you figure it out autonomously.
Charge callers some small fee and refund it if it was a real issue.
Instead of being actively hostile towards the naive idiots who gave you money for your junk of a product which you now refuse to even support.
Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.
Not at all, they say they’re “always looking for ways to improve customer experience” and just wanted to “encourage people to self solve” to increase customer satisfaction. /s
I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions)
I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either need to wait till the next day, or bring it early in the day so that it can be done by the end of the same day.
That store somehow is closed for half of the year for no reason. The next closest store is about 20 minutes of drive away, with the same thing -- arrive early or wait overnight.
Meanwhile, these repairs are straightforward repairs at genius bar that can be done within about an hour, any time of the year.
I had similar experience with laptop repairs. Apple and Intel (NUC lines) were top tier, and I was able to get back my device quickly. Not so for other manufacturers.
Apple devices come with a premium price, but as my life gets more complex, I realize that my time is worth more than the money I save on the hardware.
A man I worked with told me that eventually his entire toolbox was a VISA. He could fix just about anything, he just couldn't be bothered anymore unless it seemed like fun.
I didn't get it then, in my early 20s. In my mid 30s, with a couple of kids and a million other things to get done, shut up and take my money.
Android phones to tinker with became an iPhone that just works for years. 15 year old VWs turned into 3 year old Toyotas. Probably other choices I've made without realizing it too.
It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).
No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.
At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.
Sounds to me like some customers who did get through after the 15 minutes then complained about the wait times to workers, which means the workers had to lie about the cause.
To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing
Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
>Even if HP’s telephone support center wasn’t busy, callers would reportedly hear: We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.
i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. my isp does the exact same thing with basically the same wording. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing high call volumes right now. but hey, did you know you can do lots of stuff on the website? go to the website. please use the website".
i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#Recurring_monolog... , for the probably many people who don't know the reference.)
It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
Health insurance does this for sure. From what I have seen I am convinced they have sophisticated systems to frustrate patients and providers until they give up.
Look up Erlang numbers for call centers. We absolutely know how to calculate required reps for a desired queue dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
I wonder how these systems work now...
Erlang's model assumes that the world is static or at least predictable; it doesn't take into account things like the superBowl, a hurricane cancelling 90+% of flights from a major airport, or a much-larger-than-usual number of customers trying to cancel because of a previously-confidential price increase now being publicly announced.
But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?
Based on the anecdata I have, this is very false.
My brother used to work tech support for X-Box Live. He said 80% of his calls were for password resets, something anybody could self-service in less time than it takes to find the customer support phone number.
Sure, there were cases where they no longer had access to the original e-mail address on the account, or cases where he was sure someone was trying to social engineer their way into someone else's account by claiming a forgotten password, but generally, he'd just trigger the password reset e-mail and the customer was able to reset their password.
At one point, he tried going off-script to tell people to select the "Forgot Password" option and walk them through the self-service, but he got in trouble for it.
That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.
There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)
What a joke.
Anyway most of us already know to steer well clear of anything HP branded. It’s not the HP we remember from years past. Their junk is unreliable and they apparently have no interest in customer support.
I also love it when I spent ten minutes trying to locate the customer support line number (that is usually well hidden) for a recorded voice message reminding me that they have a website with the most generic answers to the most generic problems which I don’t have right now. Do you really think I’d be wasting my time going through your idiotic customer service number if I had found your generic answer in the FAQ helpful?
There is a special place in hell for the MBAs imagining new ways to maw everyone’s lives miserable.
Reminds me of this Norway govt ad about the job of an enshittifier: https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
But you don't have those as a real alternative! Yes, you do have some "digital", but it's of the same awful quality as this mandatory 15min rule.
If, instead, they had said "we'll call you back in about 15 minutes" and at the same time sent an email with chat/self help options it might have worked, because then you DO have 15 minutes to dick around.
what they don't tell you is that they will call you back after 4pm.
you don't keep your place in the queue. the first time around i expected to be called back within an hour, and ended up expecting a call "any minute now" the whole day.
I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.
Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away.
Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it.
But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?
Won’t be true for everyone, but if I’m ringing, it’s because the digital self-solve solution didn’t work. Which happens ridiculously often.
Right now, I’m struggling with working out how to return a laptop keyboard¹ on Amazon (India). They say you can return it, but when you try, it only offers you a “chat now” button², and the bot eventually reveals it can only help with troubleshooting, and suggests you try other options, and here’s how you can escalate to a human, and… they’re both just a link back to the start of the support system, which no longer mentions any phone number or other way of contacting a human.
And this is hardly abnormal. So many self-serve systems are just broken, and it feels to me like it’s happening increasingly often.
—⁂—
¹ For an ASUS GA503QM. Among other issues, Space/f/j activate well past the click, Space doesn’t activate at all if pressed at the ends, and it’s 2KRO with horrific ghosting—typing “you” will activate F11 most of the time, “he ” gets a spurious N, and mashing the keyboard will put the laptop to sleep (which doesn’t even make sense) among other key-pressed-state-poisoning things (though that part could be a software issue). This is particularly insulting as the original is NKRO. All up, it’s utterly unfit for purpose (the Space key is bad enough that even a hunt-and-pecker would probably notice), and the worst new keyboard I have ever encountered, by a significant margin, barring those dumb roll-up ones twenty years ago (they don’t exist any more, right? Right?).
² This isn’t true on all products: I ordered a battery at the same time, and they’ll let me return that without fuss. Which I will probably do, because despite being advertised and labelled as 5675 mAh like the original, it reports a design capacity of 4800 mAh. Straight up counterfeit/fraud. Sigh. So it’s <40% better than my five-year-old battery, instead of >60% better.
The software could just add you to a queue and it could wait longer, but instead they make you watch the software do a countdown before you can ask for your order.
On the other hand, if you're setting up an asshole filter (https://mrsteinberg.com/the-asshole-filter/), deliberately waiting a while before replying can be part of "chaotic good" tactics. You use my private email for something that has an official org process that we MUST use, per policy? It'll take me several days to reply, and then I'll ask you to use the official process anyway.
If you're setting up an asshole filter for your customers on the official support hotline, we used to call that "AITA?"
I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead episode Tech Support. Why the hell would those two dolts be allowed anywhere near a headset they picked up?
"See, Hamid: our goal is to help the customers - of course - but if we're on the phone too long, we don't make any money. We go out of business - and then what will the customers do?"
What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process.
Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access.
Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.
Having heard many other similar stories, I assume that this is really how nowadays typical customer support is, so anything else, if such a thing exists, is a rare exception.
The company had "Nuclear" in the name, and our average customer had at least a masters in physics, so maybe not the typical support situation. But in at least one case, it has been a real thing. It doesn't work at AT&T and Spectrum, I've tried.
https://rubberduckdebugging.com/