It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).
No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.
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.
Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.
Not at all, they say they’re “always looking for ways to improve customer experience” and just wanted to “encourage people to self solve” to increase customer satisfaction. /s
The hope is always that you figure it out autonomously.
Charge callers some small fee and refund it if it was a real issue.
Instead of being actively hostile towards the naive idiots who gave you money for your junk of a product which you now refuse to even support.
>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.
It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#Recurring_monolog... , for the probably many people who don't know the reference.)
Look up Erlang numbers for call centers. We absolutely know how to calculate required reps for a desired queue dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
I wonder how these systems work now...
Erlang's model assumes that the world is static or at least predictable; it doesn't take into account things like the superBowl, a hurricane cancelling 90+% of flights from a major airport, or a much-larger-than-usual number of customers trying to cancel because of a previously-confidential price increase now being publicly announced.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
Health insurance does this for sure. From what I have seen I am convinced they have sophisticated systems to frustrate patients and providers until they give up.
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.
If, instead, they had said "we'll call you back in about 15 minutes" and at the same time sent an email with chat/self help options it might have worked, because then you DO have 15 minutes to dick around.
The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention.
Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option.
People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city.
Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them.
When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone.
(That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
I'd kill for the building in Denver. Instead I always get some extremely compressed voice connection in the Philippines.
But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
The single place I noticed verizon gets coverage and tmobile doesn't is three levels underground in a concrete parking garage.
I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
If you travel internationally, they're really cheap relative to everyone else who will charge you absolutely ridiculous roaming fees.
The Google Fi plans with roaming are either $65/month (100GB) or $20/month + $10/GB. I often end up using quite a bit of data abroad.
Having moved here from the UK where I was used to cheap mobile plans I just grate at how extortionate they are in the US.
If you are so paranoid, just get multiple SIMs? Most phones support that these days, especially multiple eSIM. And the plans are really cheap (at least where I live).
My call to tech support was the generic worst. He insisted there was trouble with my current cell tower and I should reboot my phone. (ignoring the fact that I was able to get automated message). I explained I was using voice over ip, but the tech support didn't seem to understand that technology. Perhaps it wasn't in the script. I was on the call for about 30 minutes and eventually gave up. Phone started working about eight hours later.
Previous issue was with their roaming in foreign countries, however with VoIP that hasn't been an issue for years. So, a couple problems in about eight years. I rank them as one of the best among the terrible options.
They explicitly do, even among their own customers and plans. If you Google the carrier name plus QCI, you’ll find tables where people have documented, which plans are in which priority group
I've also seen MVNOs be denied frequency bands or cells that were in the highest demand, leading to worse connectivity despite being on the same network.
1. They only do transfers through their native app, not on their website. To log in to their native app, they will do SMS verification. So I sure hope you are still logged in before they lose your eSIM and leave you with no service at all.
2. If you are able to get into their native app so you can access their tech support, their AI chatbot will flat-out lie to you and tell you that T-Mobile cannot send you a QR code to download your eSIM (even though T-Mobile's own website states that they can). If you ask politely for a human, it will resist. I've found "connect me to a human you worthless fucking bot" is the secret passcode to get a real human.
3. If you request they send you a QR code, some of their support staff will ignore that request and still try to initiate the transfer through their app, so clearly requesting the QR code is not a common procedure.
4. When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. They then generate the QR code for whatever EID they have associated with your IMEI number in their database, completely ignoring the EID number you sent them. They did this to me _three_ times. The only way I managed to break the cycle was I sent them an IMEI number for a phone that was never on their network so they'd finally listen to me when I told them my EID number.
I'm never buying a phone without a physical sim card slot again. There's nothing wrong with the eSIM technology but the carriers have decided to make it as miserable as possible. The hardest part about transferring a physical SIM is finding a paperclip.
As a counterpoint (not sure if this was t-mobile, apple, or both), I just upgraded from an iPhone 11 with physical sim, to iPhone 17 with esim.
All I had to do was hold the new phone next to the old one, and it just transferred the line over and deactivated the old sim automatically. I wasn't even in the US (so not even on their network), and it was stupidly seamless.
It sounds like t-mobile support has gone downhill. Last time I had to contact support was 2020, and it was really easy back then. I rarely had to wait more than 5 minutes to get a human, and I once had an issue escalated to the "executive resolutions" team and resolved to my satisfaction the day it was opened.
Looks like that was 2 CEOs ago (Mike Sievert in 2020 and Srini Gopalan in 2025) so one of them probably bears the responsibility for this decline.
2024 might have been the start of forcing us to fight with toasters: https://www.t-mobile.com/news/business/t-mobile-launches-int...
and 2024 seems to also be when they locked down their esim transfer process: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1cnphk4/android_es...
So I guess Mike Sievert drove t-mobile into the ground?
Everything else you say is accurate but they do not require this, T-Mobile is the only major in the US that doesn’t match EID to IMEI. I know because I use a removable esim (esim.me) euicc with multiple phones. I have to read the super long eid off to support to activate it. I cannot activate service on this card with verizon or at&t as its eid doesn’t match to an imei for them.
I was also using a removable esim (from jmp.chat) and they did this to me three times. Each time it went like this:
> Me: Please send me a QR code to download my esim. My EID is XXXXXXXX
> Them: Thanks for providing your EID, please send me your IMEI (the first time this was just a plain message, the 2nd and 3rd time they sent me a link to a form to submit my IMEI to them)
> Me: <sends them my IMEI>
<at this point, the first two representatives initiated a transfer through their app and told me to wait 2 hours and then the transfer would finish. I told them whatever automatic transfer they just initiated will not work and they _need_ to send me the QR code.>
> Them: What is your e-mail address
> Me: My e-mail address is XXXXX@XXXX.XXXX
and then they'd send me a QR code. I'd then attempt to download it to my jmp.chat esim and I'd get an error that the EID was incorrect. Then, I'd try using the QR code to activate the built-in eSIM on the phone with the IMEI that I sent them, and it would work, proving that they were looking up the EID for the IMEI that I sent them rather than paying attention to the EID that I started the chat with.
The 4th and final time, I sent them my Librem 5's IMEI which had never been on T-Mobile and does not support eSIM. They told me that the phone was carrier locked, I assured them it wasn't and explicitly told them "it is important the QR code is for the EID I provided you. The past representatives have ignored that, leading to the error message <pasted the error from EasyLPAC's logs that was something like EID is incorrect>". THAT time they finally listened and sent a QR code for the correct EID, which let me download the eSIM to my jmp.chat card. At that point I was able to move the card across devices without issue.
Call during day or you get the Philippines and they don’t understand specific requests like this as well. If you must do it at night use the chat route.
Sabermetrics (Moneyball) captivated us with the idea that "gut feelings" and "stories" were inferior to raw hard data, but that same notion could also accurately be called "the McNamara fallacy"
The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)...
Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.
Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.
If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hold.
I have an issue today where a service accidentally cancelled my package but still charged me. I asked for it to be reinstated or refunded, and three times I got the same identical automated output pretending to be a person, the fourth attempt is simply a credit card charge back and a lost customer
Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
> One of the first things I did when I was involved in the set-up of online support ticket system for a GB rail retailer was https://xkcd.com/806/ compliance. If the support request body contains the phrase "Shibboleet" the ticket will be assigned to an engineer.
I get the feeling you wouldn't joke about this. I can't believe how amazing this is LOL. I /think/ I know which retailer...good to know!
> Equally it's not hard to teach front-line when to escalate, and ensure L2 and beyond are approachable. Even better if L2/L3 can keep half an eye on tickets that come in for anything that looks particularly interesting.
Right!? I did L2/L3 support many moons ago and it was very much my job to keep an eye on PFYs to ensure they weren't dismissing interesting tickets.
After I exhaust the L1 flowchart I expect some real support. I've done my bit to prove it, I expect them to reply in kind.
The reality is that companies have gone on aggressive cost cutting to maximise profits, and customer support is absolutely included in that.
What next? Shrinkflation is because 99% of people expect smaller portions?
They know getting to L2/L3 support increases costs. Eg applying a refund when legally required, delivering what was contractually agreed etc.
Also, the more we accept people are 'dumb' and dumb down our interactions with them, the dumber everyone will get. Do teachers not need to believe in the capacity of children, lest education totally go to hell?
Why do users even need to manually clear their cookies?
That's quite reasonable on their part.
I do wish I could take a quiz to bypass it, though.
We had a large (250k) workforce with a pretty wide variance in roles. We had probably about 100 people in the call center, although some of them did more interesting stuff too. It was a very good support organization with multichannel contact capabilities and really good, well paid staff.
Basically there was a barbell distribution with the lowest ranked people and highest ranked employees being the worst. (Think attorneys and other special IC and middle managers. Executives had dedicated support and didn’t use this method.) The most expensive 20% of users make 80% of the calls. The high ranking ones were dumber to deal with and took more time, the low ranking ones called too often for dumb reasons but resolved quickly.
I cannot imagine the hell on earth the general public could be.
I did them anyhow because the company said so, and I found that more often than not, it fixed the problem.
If I had sent that to second-level support without making sure of it, I'd have been written up.
So yes, they're trained to treat callers like they don't know what they're doing, because they often don't. Even if they claim to.
The best thing you can do is just go along with it quickly and get it over with, even if you've already done it. There's no way around it.
Me too. Long time ago though. I get it.
But my problem and main point is that now L2/L3 doesn't seem to exist, or is way way harder to access.
When I did L1, I was trained to permit escalation. Now, it seems people are trained to gaslight people that actually nothing is broken and it's all their head.
My favorite instance of this was with an ISP that rhymes with Bombast where it was very clear that the modem wasn't getting a signal. The lights indicated it, and I was also able to connect to the modem's internal monitoring and see that it wasn't seeing anything on the line. The support agent kept asking me to reboot my computer.
Is this bad though?
Yes
Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
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?"
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.
That, or that it DoS-ed the database.
How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?
The tags had a barcode on the back with the SKU and the price that had been printed, but naturally the scanner didn't support that format.
So I brought in my own scanner, scanned all of those into a spreadsheet, then ran a script that checked the same inventory panel that had the updated prices, and printed out a new sheet with just the barcodes that differed to run "inventory" against. Saved us hours per day.
Corporate got pissed (understandably) and shut it down real quick.
why?
Is that "American Hairless Terrier" or "Aldershot Railway Station"?
It isn't like there hasn't always been tech acronyms but they are so causally communicated these days without regard for audience.
https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...
It's just jargon. Sometimes people forget that their jargon isn't universal.
And my guess is "average hold time." If you use your brain, you can figure most of them out, unless they are adversarially confusing acronyms.
> over the past decade
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.
If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell").
HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore.
The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor.
They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.
HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company.
Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.
I yearn for the day that I'm in a stable enough career position to write about some of the shitshows I've seen.
My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off.
I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship.
Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day.
General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that.
The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to.
Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.
They're not bad for $300-500 upgradeable Costco/Best Buy laptops, especially since Dell has deteriorated and Chromebooks exited their honeymoon period at escape velocity.
The company you are thinking of still exists. It was split from HP in 1999. It is called Agilent Technologies. HP kept the name and went into the business of flogging commodity computer products, Agilent continues to design and sell low volume high end gear and kept the engineering culture that requires.
HP later split again into consumer and corporate. To put the result into perspective HP Inc's (consumer) revenue is $55B/yr, HP Enterprise is $37B/yr, and Agilent is $7B/yr.
Given the crap being thrown here you would think the splits were a disaster. I don't know if the engineering culture of Agilent would have survived if it hadn't happened.
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.)
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.
Having heard many other similar stories, I assume that this is really how nowadays typical customer support is, so anything else, if such a thing exists, is a rare exception.
The company had "Nuclear" in the name, and our average customer had at least a masters in physics, so maybe not the typical support situation. But in at least one case, it has been a real thing. It doesn't work at AT&T and Spectrum, I've tried.
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.
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?"
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.
FWIW, Airlines are actually great /if/ you're a frequent flyer. I get great service from United on the phone and did so previously from Delta, but in both cases I was a frequent traveler and so they automatically route your call into a better queue with better trained staff.
This type of support cannot be had with any of the PC vendors it seems.
But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?
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.
Based on the anecdata I have, this is very false.
My brother used to work tech support for X-Box Live. He said 80% of his calls were for password resets, something anybody could self-service in less time than it takes to find the customer support phone number.
Sure, there were cases where they no longer had access to the original e-mail address on the account, or cases where he was sure someone was trying to social engineer their way into someone else's account by claiming a forgotten password, but generally, he'd just trigger the password reset e-mail and the customer was able to reset their password.
At one point, he tried going off-script to tell people to select the "Forgot Password" option and walk them through the self-service, but he got in trouble for it.
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.
A man I worked with told me that eventually his entire toolbox was a VISA. He could fix just about anything, he just couldn't be bothered anymore unless it seemed like fun.
I didn't get it then, in my early 20s. In my mid 30s, with a couple of kids and a million other things to get done, shut up and take my money.
Android phones to tinker with became an iPhone that just works for years. 15 year old VWs turned into 3 year old Toyotas. Probably other choices I've made without realizing it too.
At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.
It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.
Not as expensive as having no customers.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What a joke.
Anyway most of us already know to steer well clear of anything HP branded. It’s not the HP we remember from years past. Their junk is unreliable and they apparently have no interest in customer support.
I also love it when I spent ten minutes trying to locate the customer support line number (that is usually well hidden) for a recorded voice message reminding me that they have a website with the most generic answers to the most generic problems which I don’t have right now. Do you really think I’d be wasting my time going through your idiotic customer service number if I had found your generic answer in the FAQ helpful?
There is a special place in hell for the MBAs imagining new ways to maw everyone’s lives miserable.
Reminds me of this Norway govt ad about the job of an enshittifier: https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing
I have not however seen it used structurally as a disincentive to calling for support. I mean it has that effect obviously but in the cases where it was implemented I have not seen that be the actual goal. That's a different level of nasty again.
As a former callcenter consultant, it was usually the bad companies that didn't care about their customers that wanted this implemented. The good ones just wanted the best they could offer and considered a 15 minute wait (even when it was simply due to high call volumes) a massive fail and an immediate need to upscale the team. As it should be. The biggest issue is often customers calling during lunch time when many agents themselves are out to lunch too. This can often be mitigated with good shifting and follow the sun support.
Ps this is completely bullshit:
> 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.”
The reason they want customers to self serve is not because it's faster. It's because it's wildly cheaper.
The cheapest support interaction is a customer self reading the documentation/kbase. Then come the AI agents, then chat with a real agent. Then far on top in terms of cost is a live call with an agent. This is because chat agents can and do handle multiple chats at the same time and often have the benefit of premade answer snippets. A live agent doesn't have any of that.
However if the customer decides they want to speak to an agent it's definitely impacting their satisfaction trying to steer them elsewhere. The "it's faster" reasoning is just spin on what is essentially just poor bottom of the barrel customer service.