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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The irony is that mandatory wait times are a form of monitoring failure. If you measured customer satisfaction with the same rigor you measure server uptime, you'd catch this immediately.
Most companies monitor their infrastructure religiously but treat their support experience as a black box. The fix is the same in both cases: measure the thing that matters (time to resolution, not tickets closed), alert when it degrades, and make the alert impossible to ignore.
>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.
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!”
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.
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".
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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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?"
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”
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Ive been happy with US mobile - you can actually switch between their VZ backed network or their ATT backed network.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're all fungible if you aren't addicted to your phone.
I was able to transfer eSIM for a lost phone using their website, I think the online carrier had run into that issue before.
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.
Those startups eventually need legions of fools with which to easily part their money.
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.
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.)
>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.
Yeah, but Baby Bell would dispatch a technician to your house if needed.
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.
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.
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.
Similarly when layoffs hit and morale gets low, guess what caliber of employee is going to jump ship and which is going to stay?
Everyone knows morale is a dump stat... if you don't track consequences.
Well, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.
Which is still not enough punishment for a decision like this. But without adequate consumer protection laws abuse like this is to be expected.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> don't know how to clear their cookies
Why do users even need to manually clear their cookies?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, this honestly scares me.
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.
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.
> 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.
Have you tried saying "shibboleet"?
I'd rather die.
People suicided because of that, and the UK post office knew fully well it was their own fault.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
To be fair, HP lost their competent customers a long time 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.
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.
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.
>my AHT flagged me
Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?
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.
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
This one is a call center metric. Similar to after call work or first call resolution. This one, I believe, is average handle time.
Musk's Acronyms Seriously Suck memo:
https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...
Average Hold Time
Average Handle Time actually
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.
I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.
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.
AHT?
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.
Average Handle Time
Assistant Head Teacher
> made someone look bad
That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
It was offline.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.
I'll always despise them (and their Itanium) for killing the DEC Alpha CPU off after they acquired it along with Compaq.
Friend worked at HP in the old days before (as he put it) the company got "Carly'd."
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.
Indeed. The older I get the more I optimize for my time spent over almost all other factors. I want to enjoy life more.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
China Southern is okay if you speak Chinese.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just further cements HP's position as one of the most anti-consumer multi-national companies in existence.
You would never suspect they once made some of the world's finest test/scientific equipment.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting, had no idea they used to make proper lab equipment
The spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).
And great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...
Those HPUX machines were hot!
No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.
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.
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.
I love the way they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with their actions
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.
HP has plenty of competition. What they're doing is suicidal.
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"
My employer buys HP products
> 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.
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.
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.
Yeah it’s almost like purposely frustrating people has negative consequences, which HP completely overlooked.
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.
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.
The irony is that mandatory wait times are a form of monitoring failure. If you measured customer satisfaction with the same rigor you measure server uptime, you'd catch this immediately.
Most companies monitor their infrastructure religiously but treat their support experience as a black box. The fix is the same in both cases: measure the thing that matters (time to resolution, not tickets closed), alert when it degrades, and make the alert impossible to ignore.
What if I told you that customer support is a marketing expense?
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?
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.
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.
Wouldn't be surprised if they have their own internal PBX system with a SIP trunk
Sigh. VoIP makes everything less interesting.
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…
"Best available laptop support" apparently means 18/30 or 12/20.
Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
>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.
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!”
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.
All call centers are actually located in Lake Wobegon, where all the call wait times are above average.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#Recurring_monolog... , for the probably many people who don't know the reference.)
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".
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.
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".
Easy for that to be true: just set your expectations to zero.
"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.
Did they admit to it? Or get caught?
>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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.)
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.
> 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.
the title spews evil
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.
Mandatory wait times is an insane concept anyway
This is unfortunately how companies die
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?"
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”
It's OK their customers can all just upgrade to MacBook neos
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.
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.
Wait 'till you hear about their printers.
(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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck?
https://rubberduckdebugging.com/