Mastodawn

HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support

https://lemmy.world/post/44521973

HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support - Lemmy.World

> In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies. > Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register [https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/hp_deliberately_adds_15_minutes/] reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”

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Boomer Humor Doomergod Mar 20

Having run a couple support teams, I get where they’re coming from with the wait time.

Every minute my team wasn’t spending helping customers was spent updating the knowledge base. We invested a ton of effort into it, and 90% of the tickets were answerable in the first interaction with a simple search.

But getting people to actually read the docs was impossible. And maybe if we made them wait they’d get frustrated

But that’s not very nice to your customers or the agents.

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Trainguyrom

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word