this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by criss_cross@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.”

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[–] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago

When I started at one company I put together a text file with all the different sources of info I found in training. By the end of training I had turned it into an HTML file. Years later we got bought out. Support from corporate disappeared on legacy customs who hadn't moved over to new stuff.

A coworker tapped me on the shoulder "If I were to make a local network web server on one of these computers could I upload your help system to it for everyone to use?"

Next thing you know I'm the default source for all information on every system that has ever existed. Prior to that everyone knew that I had it all in my brain but only a handful of people knew that I also had it all in HTML.

TL;DR I built a pirate help desk knowledge base.