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.”
I feel like a lot of companies don’t do things the good way not because the good way is hard, or the bad way is cheaper, but because management is stupid. Stupid or sometimes apathetic.
It’s both, because reducing the number of people and the options they have available to work the system is both usually cheaper to operate and it makes key performance indicators that their bosses have set go up.
The latter is where the stupid comes in and is usually more insidious because everyone always forgets that when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be an effective metric. The end result is a rats-nest of perverse incentives and compliance theatre. But the c-level bosses don’t care because arbitrary numbers went up.
This is precisely what happened at both of my call center jobs. Started out great, with new employees getting a month of training before talking with a customer, but rapidly accepting as many customers as are willing to call in.
Then when they started to fall behind on support from the extra workload, they just outsourced it to a third party and didn’t teach them jack. KPI Number go up, but every customer I talked to recognized the significant drop in quality.