Technology

You know we're gonna be talking to ai slop machines next. I'd rather wait 15 minutes for a human.

Im so glad a company finally admitted that the "we're experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume" was just bullshit.

... Wut? Who thought this was a good idea in the first place 😭

Ok so why is this such a widely adopted model by government and cellphone services increasing it up to waiting for hours on the phone ? It’s like they want you to afford to have these things but don’t expect anyone to have to have a job to earn enough to have these things.

Years ago I called them to get an RMA on a scanner that had a fingerprint on the INSIDE side of the glass. They wanted me to disassemble it and charge me $70 for the knowledge on how to do so. Fuck HP.

Their sales reps that hang out at Microcenter would actually not stop talking to me. I literally walked past them and wouldn't make eye contact. They followed me through the whole section. It wasn't until I approached an actual MC employee and said, "I will never buy an HP product. Can you help me?" The HP guy still followed us while I bought another printer! Fuck HP.

HP support sucks. They wanted me to buy a support package to get a link to a driver. Like, fuck off.

capitalism is never about the product

HP is one of those companies whose products you can easily avoid. I don't understand their dominance in the printer market, or why people continue to buy their products when many of them are objectively poor. I also don't recall a time when HP had a particularly strong reputation to begin with.

At this point, most competitors offer better alternatives than HP.

I self-solved my HP problems by never buying from HP again. I love my Brother printer. Don't any of you dare quote stories about Brother enshittifying stuff in the replies (I will cry).

It's like a CEO heard a joke or saw a comic where this happened and thought it was the best idea possible. "If we add in waiting time for no reason then some of the people will hang up and go away." It's the same logic as making anyone who wants to close an account (such as Netflix) jump through 3 people and a million hoops.

Seriously, I moved to a town where Comcast has no Internet service, I looked it up on their online service tool. They STILL ran me through retention even after they looked it up and confirmed it internally, and I had to go through 10 extra minutes of some lady reading from a script before they'd kill my account, and then had the gall to ask if I wanted to complete a customer service survey.

Yeah, my current ISP has two choices on phone: 1 for contract stuff, 2 for technical support. 1 always has at least 5 minutes waiting time, while 2 usually has none. Choices were made.

"influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve"

Corporate speakers should be paddled

While hilarious, that's more than a year old...

Yes, because the #1 thing everyone wants to hear over and over is a voice saying "go to double u double u double u dot..."

This is the fucking 21st century if they could fix their shit on the internet they would have already done it.

Especially pisses me off when the only reason you're calling them is because their website /portal / app explicitly went "you can't do that here, call us"

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.

Fuck these companies that refuse to provide customer support and try to force us on inadequate bullshit llm answers, if I didn't want a solution I would use them.

I assume every large company and bank (big or small) does this kinda shit on the regular

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.