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 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by criss_cross@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 5 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours 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 up 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.