190
"influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve"
Corporate speakers should be paddled
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
190 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
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I did tier 1, 2, and eventually some 3 support back in the day for a software company. I liked how they handled it.
Customer called in, reached a live person doing intake. The intake person noted their question and callback number, helping to scope the problem if needed, and entered a ticket into the queue. The intake person gave the caller an expected wait time for a support tech to call back, pointed them to online written help documentation, and ended the call. Then push the ticket to tier 1, 2, 3, or "urgent, need to call NOW" queues. Depending on tier and call volume and time of day, they'd get a callback from a tech anywhere from immediately to the next morning.
Support techs like myself were coached to help over the phone, but also to point out the written materials and encourage their use. I would commonly say, "sure, that's a problem we can fix, go ahead and go to screen x, click on button y, etc. By the way, you're not the only one who had had this question, we even have an entry on this in our support documentation. Let me show you where you it's at so you can get to the fix even faster than a phone call next time".
Having the intake person take numbers, then techs call back later saved customers from having to wait on hold for lengths of time. We had very few cases of irate customers stuck waiting.
My shittiest experiences are the companies that don't do any intake and make all tiers of calls wait on hold in the same queue. Luck of the draw if the tech you end up with is a tier 1 still in training pants or a tier 3 pissed to be walking a customer thru updating their password for the millionth tim.
This sounds very humane and reasonable.
I feel like a lot of companies don't do things the good way not because the good way is hard, or the bad way is cheaper, but because management is stupid. Stupid or sometimes apathetic.
It's both, because reducing the number of people and the options they have available to work the system is both usually cheaper to operate and it makes key performance indicators that their bosses have set go up.
The latter is where the stupid comes in and is usually more insidious because everyone always forgets that when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be an effective metric. The end result is a rats-nest of perverse incentives and compliance theatre. But the c-level bosses don't care because arbitrary numbers went up.
While hilarious, that's more than a year old...
It was on hold until now to encourage self discovery or sth
I'm just glad we didn't have to hold the line for a year to read this.
Well shit. I saw it on hacker news and thought it was recent.
My bad for not paying attention.
To be fair, if you got on hold with HP support on the day the article was published, you'd still be onhold today.
Nobody hates their customers like HP hates their customers.
It's never "high call volume". It's always "not enough customer service representatives".
yeah and when its every time when you have called and different days and times its not "unusally high". the message should be. since we have a policy of not hiring enough customer service representatives you wait time will be artificially high.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
HP is a garbage company. My laptops typically last until the hardware is well past obsolete, but not HP's crap. My HP X360 laptop's motherboard failed completely and the hinges just fell apart for the 2nd time. This POS didn't last for 3 years of occasional use. Never again.
HP stands for "Hinge Problems".
HP is one of the dumbest tech companies
I had to use support for a product I bought recently (NRGi/Zaptec EV charger), 3 times I had to call them, and every time I got through within 2 minutes! And my issues were quickly fixed.