HP rescinds European support call strategy due to "feedback."

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.”

  • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
    41·
    12 hours ago

    Online banking does this all of the time. It’s surprising how little you can actually do on their app, virtually every common banking task requires you to call them.

    I had to call them to set up an automatic payment on my credit card from my savings account. Because I couldn’t work out how to do it on the app. I confirmed with the support agent that you can’t do it on the app.