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Comment by fancyfredbot | Hacker News Reader

Someone presumably pitched this idea within HP and other people agreed it was something they should try. I guess probably HP didn't put its best and brightest in charge of call centres but still, isn't that sort of amazing?

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.

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I’ve seen it pitched here even, with the idea that deflecting some call volume will make call centre jobs less hell. The thing it misses is that call center jobs are hell because they’ve used metrics to optimise to the minimum number of staff, and any reduction in average call volume will just result in the company cutting staff, so now staff still have the same workload but callers are XX minutes of waiting more frustrated.

Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were hoping people would just hang up and give up. This would save money in the short term but lose money in the long term but that’s what you get when the current quarter is all that matters.

Anyway my experience with HP has taught me to never buy their products ever again.

> Let’s not kid ourselves, they knew exactly what they were doing.

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

Optimizing the wrong thing, probably wanted to shave customer support costs by having lower call volumes, but those that need support probably were hanging onto the calls since nobody that can fix things calls support (so no savings) AND reduced customer satisfaction.

I think HP was absolutely right in doing this. How many times have you opened a GitHub issues only to come back an hour later with "nvm I figured it out" and close it?

The hope is always that you figure it out autonomously.

If offering free support is too expensive, then they shouldn’t offer free support, instead of externalizing the costs by wasting the time of every customer who calls.

Charge callers some small fee and refund it if it was a real issue.

Or just accept that support is a feature of whatever junk you’re selling and build it into the price.

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.

Paid B2C support is a real tough sale. A lot of low-cost airlines don't provide support at all (if not in person), I guess because it's not practical. If costs could be covered this way, everyone could offer support. Even Google! And yet they don't.

It depends what your goal is. If HP gets charged per call answered, then their goal is to minimize the number of calls they answer. If they see a most of their calls are like "my internet is slow" or the laptop won't turn on because it's not charged up, it's easy to see how this could be approved. Same thing if they've just spent a ton of money on some AI chat agent that they need to justify as well.

Depending of the country, legislation (and changes in them), the waiting time might be taxed as well. So a way to recoup some little costs.

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