British tech news site The Register reported on Thursday about a new policy instituted for HP telephone support. Beginning on February 18th, all callers in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy started receiving a message that their wait time would be fifteen minutes, even when a customer service agent was available to speak with them.
"We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience. The next available representative will be with you in about 15 minutes To quickly resolve your issue, please visit our website support.hp.com to check out other support options or find helpful articles and assistant to get a guided help by visiting virtualagent.hpcloud.hp.com."
HP Customer Support
While this is technically not a lie, it implies that no one is available to take your call, not that HP is just wasting your time. According to HP, the goal of the new procedure was "Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve," which is a nice way of saying, "frustrating your customers until they hang up." Persistent callers would hear the message at least three times, all the while continuing to be warned about "longer wait times." There is no mention of anything like "your call is important to us," so at least they were being honest about that.
Less than 24 hours after their original reporting, The Register somewhat gleefully reported that HP had rescinded the policy "based on initial feedback." The Register declined to take credit for the abrupt backtrack, attributing the change to angry customers or beleaguered customer service agents.
Previously: Customer support is deliberately unbearable (unless you complain in public)
