They fired me for it because my AHT flagged me and it made someone look bad.

At that point (this is at Windows Vista launch) the minimum hold was 25 minutes all day.

They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.

Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.

Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.

There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.

But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.

I have been an Android user for almost 15 years. A recent incident makes me seriously think about whether I should get an iPhone (other than all the privacy/sideloading/security discussions)

I have a Samsung phone with a "protection plan" which takes care of certain repairs. I did crack the phone screen once, so I took it to a ubrealifix store to get the screen replaced. I was told that I either need to wait till the next day, or bring it early in the day so that it can be done by the end of the same day.

That store somehow is closed for half of the year for no reason. The next closest store is about 20 minutes of drive away, with the same thing -- arrive early or wait overnight.

Meanwhile, these repairs are straightforward repairs at genius bar that can be done within about an hour, any time of the year.

I had similar experience with laptop repairs. Apple and Intel (NUC lines) were top tier, and I was able to get back my device quickly. Not so for other manufacturers.

Apple devices come with a premium price, but as my life gets more complex, I realize that my time is worth more than the money I save on the hardware.

At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.

I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.

Sounds to me like some customers who did get through after the 15 minutes then complained about the wait times to workers, which means the workers had to lie about the cause.

Most companies monitor their infrastructure religiously but treat their support experience as a black box. The fix is the same in both cases: measure the thing that matters (time to resolution, not tickets closed), alert when it degrades, and make the alert impossible to ignore.

But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?

Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.

>Even if HP’s telephone support center wasn’t busy, callers would reportedly hear: We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.

i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. my isp does the exact same thing with basically the same wording. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing high call volumes right now. but hey, did you know you can do lots of stuff on the website? go to the website. please use the website".

i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.

what they don't tell you is that they will call you back after 4pm.

you don't keep your place in the queue. the first time around i expected to be called back within an hour, and ended up expecting a call "any minute now" the whole day.

That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.

There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)

Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away.

Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it.

But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?

But you don't have those as a real alternative! Yes, you do have some "digital", but it's of the same awful quality as this mandatory 15min rule.

I was going to say that the Hewlett and Packard families should ask that the company stop using their family names, but a quick glance at the company website and I only see "HP" used.

Won’t be true for everyone, but if I’m ringing, it’s because the digital self-solve solution didn’t work. Which happens ridiculously often.

Right now, I’m struggling with working out how to return a laptop keyboard¹ on Amazon (India). They say you can return it, but when you try, it only offers you a “chat now” button², and the bot eventually reveals it can only help with troubleshooting, and suggests you try other options, and here’s how you can escalate to a human, and… they’re both just a link back to the start of the support system, which no longer mentions any phone number or other way of contacting a human.

And this is hardly abnormal. So many self-serve systems are just broken, and it feels to me like it’s happening increasingly often.

—⁂—

¹ For an ASUS GA503QM. Among other issues, Space/f/j activate well past the click, Space doesn’t activate at all if pressed at the ends, and it’s 2KRO with horrific ghosting—typing “you” will activate F11 most of the time, “he ” gets a spurious N, and mashing the keyboard will put the laptop to sleep (which doesn’t even make sense) among other key-pressed-state-poisoning things (though that part could be a software issue). This is particularly insulting as the original is NKRO. All up, it’s utterly unfit for purpose (the Space key is bad enough that even a hunt-and-pecker would probably notice), and the worst new keyboard I have ever encountered, by a significant margin, barring those dumb roll-up ones twenty years ago (they don’t exist any more, right? Right?).

² This isn’t true on all products: I ordered a battery at the same time, and they’ll let me return that without fuss. Which I will probably do, because despite being advertised and labelled as 5675 mAh like the original, it reports a design capacity of 4800 mAh. Straight up counterfeit/fraud. Sigh. So it’s <40% better than my five-year-old battery, instead of >60% better.

The software could just add you to a queue and it could wait longer, but instead they make you watch the software do a countdown before you can ask for your order.

On the other hand, if you're setting up an asshole filter (https://mrsteinberg.com/the-asshole-filter/), deliberately waiting a while before replying can be part of "chaotic good" tactics. You use my private email for something that has an official org process that we MUST use, per policy? It'll take me several days to reply, and then I'll ask you to use the official process anyway.

If you're setting up an asshole filter for your customers on the official support hotline, we used to call that "AITA?"

I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead episode Tech Support. Why the hell would those two dolts be allowed anywhere near a headset they picked up?

"See, Hamid: our goal is to help the customers - of course - but if we're on the phone too long, we don't make any money. We go out of business - and then what will the customers do?"

What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process.

Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access.

Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.

https://rubberduckdebugging.com/