HP has been a shitty company for decades. Why do people still buy things from them? They are dead to me.
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.
I don't deal with hardware much anymore, but I'd take Aruba over Cisco any day. But for everything else, yeah fuck HP.
I worked briefly for Cisco because they acquired my company (a much smaller competitor) to help eliminate competition. The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me (and everybody else from this smaller company) two months' notice of the layoff and didn't have us escorted out of the building or anything.
It'd be cooler if they did escort you out of the building but also paid 2 months tbh
Well, I was WFH at the time and they didn't give me anything to do so it was effectively that anyway. And really they had given me almost no work to do for the four months prior to that - which of course is why I was not even the least bit surprised by the layoff. My severance was to the penny exactly what I would have gotten from unemployment, so it effectively meant I got unemployment benefits without having to pretend to look for work. Also, they randomly sent me a check for $6K that I have no idea what for (not PTO or sick time compensation) and I used it to buy a school bus. So overall I can't really hate them too much. Years later I found out my mother had thought I was working for Sysco (the food supply conglomerate) instead of Cisco.
What did you do with the school bus?
Installed a Sysco router (sushi belt)
It's my understanding their enterprise products are still good. It's the consumer products which suck
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 was all about "Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve," and "taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies."
If you wanted customers to go online to self-solve, you'd write proper manuals, provide well-documented and granular error codes and allow people to run diagnostics on their own devices... By not providing either it's clear the warranty cost efficiencies they're talking about are people giving up on trying to resolve their issue and just buying a new one
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.
The problem, as far as HP will be concerned, is the strategy was leaked to the public. If there was no leak there would have been no news, and no 'feedback'.
HP won't take this as a signal to not do the shitty thing. They'll take this as a signal to back off for now, and then try the shitty thing again later, but slowly and bit-by-bit, so there's no big news.
That's politics, all big companies do politics.
Well yes, that's the point.
That's how we know exactly how this playbook goes, because we've seen it before.
The fact that all big companies are doing this doesn't mean that we should think any less badly of HP for doing it too.
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!
Uhhuh. "Feedback", read: risk of class action lawsuits from everybody they tried stopping from reaching the support they paid for
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.
Nah, call centers do generate income because they force their support agents to try to up sell you on other products and services.
Only when they have something to sell. That's not as common as you'd think.
Having spent the first 8 years of my career in a call center, it's fairly common.
I’ve spent the last 15 years in call centers and only spent 1 year on a line of business that involved upselling. There’s plenty of lines that don’t. Yes it is common but it’s just as common to not.
You noticed we were doing it so we'll be more sneaky about it next time.
"We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience."
LOL!
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."
Upset employees who have to pickup the call after customer waits 15 minutes.
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?
People who buy HP products get what they deserve.
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.
“It woz The Reg wot won it.”
Did I have a stroke?
Allow me to translate from Chav: The Register first reported on this which created the feedback.
And specifically, a reference to It's the Sun Wot Won It, a headline in the Murdoch press, not-good-enough-to-be-toilet-paper tabloid rag The Sun, crowing that they had enough influence in the 1992 general election to secure a win for the Conservatives.
Thanks for the breakdown from across the pond.
Just in case, it's a reference to the Sun newspaper "winning" the election for Tony Blair's New Labour government
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
