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 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.

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".

And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.

That's politics, all big companies do politics.

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!

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.

Technically they aren't lying: their subjective experience is much better when they don't have to deal with customers.

If cutting our tech support staff in half is what is needed to raise our stock price 1 cent and jack up my bonus then so be it.

"... so we can be sure to avoid ever actually implementing them."

Yep, it's just evil to their own staff. It seems every time I have to call some call centre these days, when I finally get to a human the conversation starts something like "I've just spent 40 fucking minutes trying to get to talk to a person and I'm really pissed off. I know that's not your fault and I apologise in advance if I struggle to contain my frustrations while we talk. Now.."

HP listens to their support staff?

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.

Allow me to translate from Chav: The Register first reported on this which created the feedback.

Just in case, it's a reference to the Sun newspaper "winning" the election for Tony Blair's New Labour government