this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support (arstechnica.com)
submitted 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) by criss_cross@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.

In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.

Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”

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[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 25 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 10 minutes ago)

I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I'm not sure it helped too many people. We didn't have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual's help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can't even argue with that philosophy.

But most callers just didn't have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn't know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn't know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was "the computer." They didn't know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they'd argue with us about it. "I don't have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks." No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

How could you tell that people were not reading the knowledge base? They probably didn't need to call if they did, so maybe you reduced the volume by 50%. I get what you are trying to say, but if they make me wait 15 minutes just because, I'm going to be pissed once I reach someone. Then the person who doesn't deserve my bad temper will feel it and I will never buy hardware from you again.

And I'm saying that despite having worked at customer support for years, writing knowledge-base entries and developing the system we used to store it.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Thankfully we didn’t take phone calls. And I knew they weren’t reading the KB because we’d reply with a link to the KB and they’d be happy.

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, but I mean how do you know people didn't read it.

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

You probably didn't see the ones reading into it, just the ones that didn't.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

The only time the KB really saved was being able to send them a link to the docs that they should have been able to find instead of retyping the response. Which is good because time to first response kept going down as we wrote more articles.

All of the answers were right there and they didn’t see it. And no matter how many articles we added the volume of tickets resolved on the first reply with a KB article didn’t go down. (I know because I tracked this as a KPI for a while until it became obvious it wasn’t budging.)

My only conclusion from this is that there is a segment of people who will always ask someone for help rather than take initiative.