- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Uhhuh. “Feedback”, read: risk of class action lawsuits from everybody they tried stopping from reaching the support they paid for
HP is in no way alone in doing this. This is an industry standard. Call centers are critically understaffed and under supplied on purpose. Call centers do not generate income, and the more customers that reach an agent, the more the call center ultimately costs to operate.
HP has been a shitty company for decades. Why do people still buy things from them? They are dead to me.
There is literally no good corporate computer manufacturer anymore. Dell, HP, Lenovo, all not good.
There are decent companies for home laptops: system76, framework, etc…
But they don’t have the support infrastructure necessary for many corporate IT departments.
It’s a company who makes them and their partners lots of money, any company you see pushing HP products is just as shady as them. They’ve been riding their brand recognition for at least a decade.
Then right before their EOL’s they push all their old stock for pennies and suddenly everyone has a HP product and they don’t complain for the most part cause they got them dirt cheap.
I’m in IT. I get cold called by VAR trying to sell me HPE here and there. I tell them straight up I won’t buy HP cause of their business practices.
It’s my understanding their enterprise products are still good. It’s the consumer products which suck
I don’t deal with hardware much anymore, but I’d take Aruba over Cisco any day. But for everything else, yeah fuck HP.
I worked briefly for Cisco because they acquired my company (a much smaller competitor) to help eliminate competition. The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me (and everybody else from this smaller company) two months’ notice of the layoff and didn’t have us escorted out of the building or anything.
It’d be cooler if they did escort you out of the building but also paid 2 months tbh
Well, I was WFH at the time and they didn’t give me anything to do so it was effectively that anyway. And really they had given me almost no work to do for the four months prior to that - which of course is why I was not even the least bit surprised by the layoff. My severance was to the penny exactly what I would have gotten from unemployment, so it effectively meant I got unemployment benefits without having to pretend to look for work. Also, they randomly sent me a check for $6K that I have no idea what for (not PTO or sick time compensation) and I used it to buy a school bus. So overall I can’t really hate them too much. Years later I found out my mother had thought I was working for Sysco (the food supply conglomerate) instead of Cisco.
What did you do with the school bus?
Installed a Sysco router (sushi belt)
It was all about “Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve,” and “taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies.”
If you wanted customers to go online to self-solve, you’d write proper manuals, provide well-documented and granular error codes and allow people to run diagnostics on their own devices… By not providing either it’s clear the warranty cost efficiencies they’re talking about are people giving up on trying to resolve their issue and just buying a new one
And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.
It doesn’t even make sense. One can have a voice bot with an LLM, if it’s so bad. One can ask if the customer wants to get an SMS with an URL to support page. Asking them if they want to be sent to operators after that.
But just 15 minutes basic wait so that less people would reach operators - why the hell, I don’t get it, how is it better than just waiting in queue when all operators are busy and not waiting when, well, not. If the operators are overloaded and perform worse - then allow bigger ACW times, more breaks, maybe hire more operators.
Especially for a computer hardware company one can script most support calls pretty unambiguously. They are not going to be helping out a grandma via phone when “Internet isn’t working”.
You’re completely right, if the goal is good customer support and decent working conditions for the operators.
It’s not. The goal is like 1rre said - make people get fed up and stop trying to get their stuff fixed, just buy a new one. Oh, and they could fire half the operators too, since less people would be willing to wade through the pile of shit to talk to them.
Money and profit, screw the rest.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience.”
LOL!
Technically they aren’t lying: their subjective experience is much better when they don’t have to deal with customers.
People who buy HP products get what they deserve.
I don’t think that’s fair. Plenty of people in this world do not know much about computers or the internet or anything in that area and just need a printer. So they go to their local big box store and there’s the HP printers and they’re a good deal, so they buy them.
Consumers do not get what they deserve when companies treat them like shit just because they don’t have certain knowledge.
I want a fucking human who can quickly help me solve my issue. I don’t want to spend hours looking through “could be” problems. If you manufactured the software then your engineers understand it… Your end users only know how to use it the way they need to use it not all the options and variables.
If you manufactured the software then your engineers understand it
Ah I see the misunderstanding, the engineers were sacked after they finished writing the code.
Of course they didn’t leave any documentation because management said that writing it was a waste of time
I see we have the same managers. Were you also advised that public facing databases were better than an API in a VPC and that 1 password shared among colleagues is easier than managing credentials?
Don’t worry, I found a new gig starting in a few weeks (out of the pot into pan )
The problem, as far as HP will be concerned, is the strategy was leaked to the public. If there was no leak there would have been no news, and no ‘feedback’.
HP won’t take this as a signal to not do the shitty thing. They’ll take this as a signal to back off for now, and then try the shitty thing again later, but slowly and bit-by-bit, so there’s no big news.
That’s politics, all big companies do politics.
Well yes, that’s the point.
That’s how we know exactly how this playbook goes, because we’ve seen it before.
The fact that all big companies are doing this doesn’t mean that we should think any less badly of HP for doing it too.
Start with a few minutes instead of 15, and make sure the calls don’t appear in the call queue for staff to see. Then don’t tell anyone you did it.
And voila, no leaks, no feedback!
You noticed we were doing it so we’ll be more sneaky about it next time.