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.

Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck?

https://rubberduckdebugging.com/

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.

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.

to simplify things I am abandoning any technology that gives me grief, or hireing local profesionals to handle if there is any advantage in useing the technology. the flip side is that I am focusing on my real world abilities to manualy design and build things that those with technology and training struggle with sometimes,as all the technology in the world wont do 3d visualisations as fast as a brain that then can run one of the pen plotters it has on standby.

> We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience.

What a joke.

Anyway most of us already know to steer well clear of anything HP branded. It’s not the HP we remember from years past. Their junk is unreliable and they apparently have no interest in customer support.

I also love it when I spent ten minutes trying to locate the customer support line number (that is usually well hidden) for a recorded voice message reminding me that they have a website with the most generic answers to the most generic problems which I don’t have right now. Do you really think I’d be wasting my time going through your idiotic customer service number if I had found your generic answer in the FAQ helpful?

There is a special place in hell for the MBAs imagining new ways to maw everyone’s lives miserable.

Reminds me of this Norway govt ad about the job of an enshittifier: https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ

It is technically possible for mandatory 15 minute support call wait times to increase total user happiness by lowering average wait time in the queue.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126416

Won't this just cause more issues with customer server agents. Like I would assume more people would be annoyed once they get an agent.

My god this is comic book villain level of business behaviour. Honestly whoever comes up with these decisions needs an exorcism.

> 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.

All the sudden it's a bad idea now that you can have people talk to a chat bot for 15 minutes.

A company that behaves like this should never be purchased from again.

Like Kevin Costner, I’m surprised that HP keeps getting work.

It's OK their customers can all just upgrade to MacBook neos

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

Wait 'till you hear about their printers.

This is something most callcenter software has had since forever. It's about expectation management (usually the feature is named somewhere along those lines too), making the customer wait when it's quiet tends to make them less pissed when they have to wait at busy times. And also to differentiate paid support tiers.

I have not however seen it used structurally as a disincentive to calling for support. I mean it has that effect obviously but in the cases where it was implemented I have not seen that be the actual goal. That's a different level of nasty again.

As a former callcenter consultant, it was usually the bad companies that didn't care about their customers that wanted this implemented. The good ones just wanted the best they could offer and considered a 15 minute wait (even when it was simply due to high call volumes) a massive fail and an immediate need to upscale the team. As it should be. The biggest issue is often customers calling during lunch time when many agents themselves are out to lunch too. This can often be mitigated with good shifting and follow the sun support.

Ps this is completely bullshit:

> 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.”

The reason they want customers to self serve is not because it's faster. It's because it's wildly cheaper.

The cheapest support interaction is a customer self reading the documentation/kbase. Then come the AI agents, then chat with a real agent. Then far on top in terms of cost is a live call with an agent. This is because chat agents can and do handle multiple chats at the same time and often have the benefit of premade answer snippets. A live agent doesn't have any of that.

However if the customer decides they want to speak to an agent it's definitely impacting their satisfaction trying to steer them elsewhere. The "it's faster" reasoning is just spin on what is essentially just poor bottom of the barrel customer service.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

This is unfortunately how companies die

the title spews evil

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those startups eventually need legions of fools with which to easily part their money.

> 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.

I'd rather die.

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.

Corporates. I see so many HP monitors, laptops. I guess their leasing terms are good, financially?

My employer buys HP products

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.

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.)

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.

I was running scripts on their PoS (EDIT: point of sale) terminals to hit an internal service. If I were the sysadmin at corporate, people like me would make me nervous too (even though I wasn't doing anything nefarious).

If you prefetch all those options in the background, I bet the DB would be unhappy.

    > over the past decade

You must be young. Do you not think there were similarly acronym infested tech speak in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s? All of those decades also had plenty of certification testing.

This one is a call center metric. Similar to after call work or first call resolution. This one, I believe, is average handle time.

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

Musk's Acronyms Seriously Suck memo:

https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...

That highly prestigious in-group of call-center workers....

It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.

If you're not part of their industry, just look up the acronyms instead of getting mad. "Audience" is laughable, they are not posting solely for your entertainment.

And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.

Average Handle Time actually

Baseline demand affects the numbers much more than the unpredictable spikes do. You can come up with edge cases if you like, but the reality is that it all averages out pretty well with large volume.

Paid B2C support is a real tough sale. A lot of low-cost airlines don't provide support at all (if not in person), I guess because it's not practical. If costs could be covered this way, everyone could offer support. Even Google! And yet they don't.

Or just accept that support is a feature of whatever junk you’re selling and build it into the price.

Instead of being actively hostile towards the naive idiots who gave you money for your junk of a product which you now refuse to even support.

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.

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.

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, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.

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.

The spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).

Those HPUX machines were hot!

No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.

This was during 1999-2002 and 2004-2006, HP-UX 10.x and 11.

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?

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

> don't know how to clear their cookies

Why do users even need to manually clear their cookies?

Yeah, this honestly scares me.

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.

> 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

> 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).

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.

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.

eSIM transfers are an absolute nightmare on T-Mobile. I recently did two of them and both times, the transfer started but never finished, so I ended up with no service on either device. That means no ability to call their support line and no ability to receive the confirmation SMS they use to verify you are the correct person. They also immediately permanently nuke your physical SIM card so the only way to go back to sanity is to purchase another $10 physical sim card or get one of the physical sim cards that you load eSIMs onto (I did the latter so it won't self-destruct every time I do a transfer).

1. They only do transfers through their native app, not on their website. To log in to their native app, they will do SMS verification. So I sure hope you are still logged in before they lose your eSIM and leave you with no service at all.

2. If you are able to get into their native app so you can access their tech support, their AI chatbot will flat-out lie to you and tell you that T-Mobile cannot send you a QR code to download your eSIM (even though T-Mobile's own website states that they can). If you ask politely for a human, it will resist. I've found "connect me to a human you worthless fucking bot" is the secret passcode to get a real human.

3. If you request they send you a QR code, some of their support staff will ignore that request and still try to initiate the transfer through their app, so clearly requesting the QR code is not a common procedure.

4. When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. They then generate the QR code for whatever EID they have associated with your IMEI number in their database, completely ignoring the EID number you sent them. They did this to me _three_ times. The only way I managed to break the cycle was I sent them an IMEI number for a phone that was never on their network so they'd finally listen to me when I told them my EID number.

I'm never buying a phone without a physical sim card slot again. There's nothing wrong with the eSIM technology but the carriers have decided to make it as miserable as possible. The hardest part about transferring a physical SIM is finding a paperclip.

Ive been happy with US mobile - you can actually switch between their VZ backed network or their ATT backed network.

Google Fi punches above its weight class as an MVNO. It's apparently often even prioritized better than many telcos' own cheap plans.

(Obvious downside: It's Google.)

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.

I was able to transfer eSIM for a lost phone using their website, I think the online carrier had run into that issue before.

They're all fungible if you aren't addicted to your phone.

Indeed. To a carrier, VoIP means WhatsApp, Discord, Google Meet.

I usually end up paying about $5/month, though that is a data only plan as I just use Google Voice for calls and use maybe a couple of gigs of data.

Having moved here from the UK where I was used to cheap mobile plans I just grate at how extortionate they are in the US.

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.

Apologies on getting back late but… I’ve never had that experience. Historically I would call during day and get someone stateside. They would ask for IMEI and I would say ‘it’s not in your db but EID works’ and then they’d let me read that off, never an issue. Now I use the chat, it’s faster since they just give a portal link you drop the details to.

Call during day or you get the Philippines and they don’t understand specific requests like this as well. If you must do it at night use the chat route.