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.”
It’s never “high call volume”. It’s always “not enough customer service representatives”.
yeah and when its every time when you have called and different days and times its not “unusally high”. the message should be. since we have a policy of not hiring enough customer service representatives you wait time will be artificially high.
We value your call. Unfortunately we don’t value our employees so we are experiencing a limited amount of agents to take your call because we don’t pay them enough. We thank you for your patience while our slaves work hard to deal with your frustrations with our enshitification of our products. They have nothing to do with it but we know how much our company has pissed you off. Your call will be received in the order it was received. Your current wait time is… SEVENTY. FIVE. MINUTES. We appreciate you as a customer.