this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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297
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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[–] GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

What he is saying is, while a lot of the phone calls you got were answered with the KB, this doesn't reflect the people who didn't call because they used the KB. For that, you would need to track total sales, new customer intake, volume over time, etc. It's quite possible you could have customers who got a KB reply from your support staff in a timely manner and decided if it was that easy for you to get an answer to them, it would be worth it for them to try it before calling next time.

Of course, the reality is quite likely that the main users of the knowledge base you built was the support team, which still isn't a loss.

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 1 points 7 hours ago

Thanks 💖

I was too tired to come back yesterday.