45
votes
HP ditches mandatory fifteen-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn't good support
- Published
- Feb 21 2025
- Word count
- 418 words
HP ditches mandatory 15-minute wait time policy due to
'feedback'getting caughtOn one side I don't think having a mandated X amount of time for minimum waiting to be a horrific thing, as it does allow for some wiggle room for those working the call centers, less stress, etc, but the problem to me is that 1) it was focused on certain geographies and 2) they tried to hide it.
There is no wiggle room if the slammed call queue is just on a 15 minute delay. I don't expect a giant like HP to have any breathing room at all for their techs, the team must be "lean" after all. So instead of surprising people with a quick response rate, this just means you get increasingly annoyed customers on the phone making it worse for your reps.
Having worked in the business this paragraph says it all. HP hamfisting a shift left strategy is straight up a cost cutting measure. No more, no less.
I agree entirely. If it was the 'industry standard' and known that there will be a 15 minute minimum queue (ie, through regulations) this would be fantastic, but it's not, and so it's going to be horrible and be a reason (to management) to have less staff, overworking those that remain.
I agree, it would work.. but only for the reps. Which isn't an entirely bad thing. Poor guys are overworked as it is.
On the flipside though, even the users are getting shafted nowadays, just try to find any callcenter phone number to begin with, if I finally find the number after ten minutes of clicking around -or sometimes even googling to find it at an outside source- and I was then also told I must wait 15 minutes I may just prefer if an HP director would personally email me a middle finger instead.
You're also completely right that they got caught and that's why they changed policy. If nobody noticed this would've been kept in place.
So the idea with it is by making calling be unpleasant, there would be fewer calls and therefore less work for the call center staff collectively. Agreed so far. Bit of a blunt solution.
But assuming it would be good for the call center workers individually seems to be missing why the call centers are so high stress. It's not just because of the volume of calls, but because the companies employing them keep staffing to the minimal possible level. If there's less work for the staff, companies will just take that slack and use it to have less staff, not to ensure a more reasonably paced and pleasant work environment.
And then you're just making things worse for consumers to reduce staffing costs for companies that have already been paid for products and services. I don't see why this would be a good idea.
Based on my own experience and those I've heard from others, it's a rare call centre that's staffed well enough to not have over 15 minutes of hold time for a large portion of the day. What the minimum wait might accomplish is allowing for fewer staff at off-peak times. The other thing it might accomplish is deterring calls. My call centre workplace heavily pushed a website as an alternative, and we all knew but left unsaid that the wait times, while within the company's legal obligations, were a good way to 'incentivise' people to seek those alternatives.
So I work primarily in a customer facing role doing field work, but I did spend about 1.5 years in our company's analytics department. I'll never forget being on a call where they were talking about call volume and trying to find out ways to get customers to be able to self-serve online rather than call in. Concept is fine, makes perfect sense. Always better for the customer if they are able to do things themselves rather than have to call in, and it costs the company less money as well since they don't have to have as much support staff, etc. But what was NOT fine to me, was a test solution they implemented. Rather than try to make the online self-serve experience better, one of their proposed solutions was to force longer wait times with the end goal of encouraging people to hang up the phone and try to handle the issue themselves through the online portal.
It was eye opening to me. They thought this was a perfectly acceptable solution. To me, intentionally degrading your service is just a non-starter as morally wrong.
There's a reason (well, multiple reasons) I went back to the field work. Far too many instances of "you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think about if you should".
Quite a few times when I’m holding, the hold music will be interspersed with messages saying “Did you know that if you weren’t a moron you would be solving this online in our help portal?”
Of course I know; I tried that first. I’m calling because your shit is broken and I need you to fix it on your end. But when I hear that message repeated to me for the next 20 minutes all it makes me think is that “we’d rather not deal with you and we’re OK with wasting your time and money.”
If you're working for a call center, would you rather deal with customers that have been on hold for 2 minutes or customers that have been on hold for 15?
This is such a bad idea that it used to be like a joke idea. "Oh we make everyone wait 15 minutes and half of them give up. It saves us a ton of money."
For context: I responded here as well. . If this was a regulatory and expected call queue thing, I believe it would lower tempers and make things a lot more reasonable. But, sadly, we don't live in that world.
I still disagree. I don’t often pick up the phone to access support, but when I do it’s because I’ve exhausted my other options, and it’s a timely issue. If it’s not urgent, then I’ll happily submit an email support ticket and wait for the reply in a few days (or hours if I’m super lucky, but I also rarely check my own emails for a reply)
There have been a few times that I’ve gotten frustrated by the wait time that by the time I eventually connect, I already know I’m going to be frustrated and unpleasant to work with, so I immediately tell the rep “hey nothing against you but I need you to escalate me to your supervisor right away” — for the double-benefit of talking to someone who a) has the authority to do more than the entry level support rep, and b) whose incentive is to wrap up with me asap and move on to the next customer (or whatever they do when I’m not talking to them)
I think considering the incredibly broad range of humans, I’m probably a bit more cool headed and a bit more likely to think through and plan my interactions than most, and already I strongly dislike the idea of a mandatory wait and think it would be detrimental to being able to quickly solve my issues
My current ISP has literally the opposite system than what you’re proposing — if I call them up and land at the back of a queue, I’m not required to wait on the line until they’re ready — I can just press a button to have them note my phone number and then the support rep calls me back when they’re free/when I’m at the front of the queue
Having experienced this side of things, I can tell you I’m a lot less frustrated and therefore thinking a lot more clearly when I do finally get to talk to a support rep, which means I’m much more likely to get a quick solution
In my experience, opting to be called back means you may possibly be called back, and if you are it will be much longer than if you stayed on the line. But even in the best of times, you have to be absolutely sure that you are available to answer the call because if you miss it then you will have to go through the queue again; there is no number you can call back for priority. Given the only time I ever used this feature was for business, it was extremely likely I would have to take another call which meant that it was basically impossible for this to not happen, which meant I had to stay on the line and waste my time.
The cruel thing is it would reduce call volume and so might make sense on a organisational level, but every individual worker's time per call goes up, because instead of getting to the point every caller is giving you a five minute rant about the hold times. Especially when the queue is long. Fewer calls but longer, so excluding ethics is it even improving things? Could go either way.
I'm guessing they were adopting
customer screwinger, cost saving measures from the US health insurance industry. Make customers miserable and suffer until as many of them as possible give up. 'What, some of those customers have depression and suicidal ideation? Surely we can't be blamed for something like that, won't someone think of the shareholders!' Etc... Standard corporate evil stuff.Or they'll just cut staffing numbers
You can have that wiggle room and high quality of life for employees without mandatory wait times by just staffing up. So you call and you immediately get somebody, but it can be somebody who is just coming off a rest period.
I'm just amazed that HP was ever known for having good customer support. I thought it's whole reputation was for making hardware that constantly breaks for no reason.
My experience with HP over the last 20 years is that they exist solely to manufacture e-waste.
Hot tip from a former field tech: those call center phone trees usually have a sequence you can enter that'll jump you to the head of the queue. It's used by their authorized techs to minimize time on-site, and for consumer-class warranty regimes, they don't usually flag calls that cut the line like that as being from techs. With the exception of the business-class call centers, the phone techs answer as though you're Joe Schmoe starting a new service request.
I imagine you might be able to find what each support center's specific sequence is by judicious use of Google search, but I've never tried looking.
Google search is way more likely to just serve you ads these days, but if anyone has had any luck finding these sequences of numbers I'd love to know what terms you used or which search you used to get them. I often struggle trying to find the support number at all these days since everyone wants you to use chat or email first, let alone finding the golden key like this.
You're probably right. My field tech experience is about a year out-of-date at this point, so they might all have closed up this egregious vector for good customer service by now.
I don't see how it could hurt to try, though.
Another hack I'm wondering about if it could be efficient: usually investor relations is better staffed than customer services, and it pays to have just one share of the company to receive better service. Is there anyone who has experience with this in tech? It is definitely true for banking.
I think its interesting that on one end of the tech support spectrum we have companies implementing ways to try to encourage users to troubleshoot themselves, and on the other end, those same companies sabotaging their products such that you cant fix it yourself.
Companies these days are just sabotaging their own quality at both ends of tech support in order to squeeze profit out of a product.
A silly way to do it but I get it.
I’m the director of a small business in resident building management.
We are perpetually on the receiving end of calls and emails taking up our time by people who could solve issues themselves. This sucks up our staffs time and takes them away from things that actually need to be done.
Some of these requests/demands are bonkers and we now have to state for all new residents “this is not a hotel and we are not your concierge” and I’ve had some resident demands get to the stage I’ve had to explain “I’m not your dad, you’re an adult, you need to do things for yourself”.
But we are very responsive, I’ve set KPI’s for clearing the inbox, having client maintenance requests resolved or into a workflow ASAP.
However high responsiveness sometimes gives people the impression that we have nothing else to do than be contacted for everything no matter how silly.
So we’ve started implementing delayed responses for time wasting communications.
Emailed to complain about a spider in the garden? (I wish I was joking).
If I even bother to reply, I’ve set it to delay by 3 business days before it sends.
I’ve found now a bit of a drop in time wasting communications and there is less of a back and forth of the communications going on and on and on.
Often people hit a tiny issue and get themselves worked up in that moment and really just want to vent, making them wait has them cool off a bit and usually things just stop immediately.
This new policy along with informing all residents that we reserve the right to terminate abusive phone calls for the sake of my staff was well worth it.
Simply, you might be smart but there is a percentage of the population who are basically unable to think for themselves or will immediately rely on demanding somebody else’s help rather than even attempting to consider the problem; and just get themselves totally worked up in the moment when if you just make them wait for a bit they realise they’re being silly and move on.
So I could see how making somebody wait 15 minutes could be in the hope to trigger the person thinking a little bit while on hold and going “oh shit I haven’t pushed the ON button” and then hanging up and saving HP wasted staff time.
I wonder how many calls they get that come down to “sir you need to replace your toner”. I imagine it’s a lot.
From what I’ve heard of HP in recent years, yeah that’s probably true (even when their toner is actually full, because HP decided to remotely brick the perfectly functioning printer because the
victimcustomer decided to stop paying the toner subscription)Do you really think a 15 minute wait is going to stop someone complaining about a spider in the garden? It strikes me that the kind of person who does this is desperately seeking for social connections, as they are lacking in them. Some may just be prone to complain because they are privileged and used to being coddled, but I suspect for many it comes from a place of loneliness more than anything else.
As mentioned in my comment, yes, I’ve noticed that by implementing a small delay people sometimes take the extra moment to resolve the issue themselves or change their mind.