Just another thing to remind family of when they inevitably ask why they shouldn’t just buy the cheapest printer/laptop/widget from HP.
“We are experiencing longer wait times” Yeah, because you intentionally made it that way to game your internal metrics.
I can’t wait for them to finally burn enough users that they finally get a clue and stop buying HP garbage, and the company can finally die from its decisions.
The line that really galls me is “generate warranty cost efficiencies” - i.e. make it really difficult to get through so that customers with defective products are incentivised to simply give up, rather than to claim on the warranty they were promised for their defective product.
Absolute scumbags.
I had a little argument with one of my parents about a certain Linus Tech Tips video that compared the customer support of certain pre-built PC sellers. They simulated a stick of RAM becoming slightly dislodged during shipping, preventing the computer from powering on. Then they got one of their less-versed employees on the line with the PC’s respective phone number. The guy at the desk at the computer store down the road solved it in 10 minutes, while Dell had the poor LTT employee getting whiplash from being transferred between every Indian call center worker with a pulse, while constantly being pestered about extended warranty and whatnot, for 45 minutes. I made the point that I would not buy from Dell after seeing the state of their customer support, but my parent did not seem to be able to imagine a customer support line that wasn’t outsourced to the other side of the planet.
Ironically one of the reasons I was buying macs in the mid to late aughts was the apple store combined with apple care. I knew that if there was anything I could not handle I just had to go there and it would be taken care of. I stopped doing macs when they reversed course when the apple stored told us power cord fraying was our fault and they would not fix/replace along with going from high powered machines with tons of ports to minimalist designs that got rid of everything but touchscreens (or so it felt).
As bad as they are in that way (and many others), I can only consider Dell or Lenovo for mainstream laptops. They are the only manufacturers, to my knowledge, that make service manuals readily available or at least easy to obtain.
If it’s not a terminal or expensive fault, I’d just rather fix it myself than deal with customer support anyway - even in warranty.
Where I am, it is the retailers problem to solve up to 2 years from purchase. This covers the terminal cases.
For desktops I’ll just build myself, and make a point to offer builds to friends & family in the market.
a customer support line that wasn’t outsourced to the other side of the planet
Onshore support is indeed a bloody rarity these days.
The only HP I deal with is at work, where I’m forced to because some high up idiot (who uses mac exclusively) made a decision and refuses to believe it was a bad one. (The bonus they were rewarded with after kinda reinforces their opinion)
Wild that when I do well in my job I maybe get a pat on the back but an executive does, well, literally anything that might be related to their job even if it’s bad and they get a huge bonus.
“I made things more efficient!” “Ok, that’s your job.”
“I bought some shitty printers and laid off a bunch of people.” “HOLY SHIT HERE’S SIX MILLION DOLLARS!!”
I really wish I knew, then I’d actually be able to afford a house.
I had an issue a couple of years ago with an HP laptop where the USB-C port would stop working after a reboot. DSIM cleanup-image would temporarily fix it so it had to be software based. The warranty was only good for about another week when I first got in touch.
They did everything in their power to run that week out and tried getting me to send it in for repair that could take a month rather than fixing the issue. I finally found an obscure forum post that fixed it. Their support is absolute trash.
They still have some catching up to do if they want to be as bad as Microsoft.
Did you know they stop playing hold music after 3 hours?
Spent 9 hours on the phone with Microsoft one day for a work thing. 5 of those were me on hold. Thank God I was wfh that day lmao
Yeah, that was my reason for calling too, but I just gave up after 6 hours.
I was being paid for it and the client I was doing work was paying for it, so I just played video games while on hold and my bosses praised me for being so dedicated lmao.
Hey kids, gather 'round you’ll be amazed to hear this.
Once upon a time, HP was just H and P and they both had some pretty good gear for sale. Then they became HP and their gear was still pretty dang good. Some of it is still going actually.
But then, The Enshittification Monsters of Silicon Valley decided they wanted the Eternal More and HP then became HP now. They ransacked the land of ideas, they fired The Old Heads, and they brought in New CEO who was very exceptional in her ridiculous evilness. And now it’s all radioactive.
But still. Once upon a garage it was a good thing. Heed the lessons well.
Thier enshittification started with printers…
Indeed. Ironic, as some of the early ones were quite good.
We have an LJ1010 that just refuses to die. All we feed it are cheap knock-off carts and it continues to churn out the pages.
Only thing I’ve had to do is force the driver into thinking everything is label stock. The fuser is weak, so the label setting gives it a little more oomph.
They still make some good ones, but nothing on the consumer side. The 25k page/month enterprise models are great as home printer. If you shell out about 5k, toner is cheap at volume, scanning/fax/copy is smooth.
Reminder that HP designs and manufactures the biometric apartheid system for the terrorist state of Israel
Imagine thinking people want to call someone. The reason they are calling is because your digital support was insufficient.
I’m a little bit surprised that anyone would do other than what I do: Put the phone on speaker, continue working with the bullshit going on in the background, and then if 2 hours later they pick up, take the phone back up and begin. The length of the hold time should simply be irrelevant, if it’s going to be above a couple of minutes, because you shouldn’t be holding anything up waiting for it.
That’s all fine and well until the rep that fate assigns you fat fingers the phone and disconnects your call, pushing you all the way back to the end of the queue again.
100% this
This is just layoffs with more steps. People aren’t this patient, so forcing a minimum wait allows HP to have less contact center staff. Irony is it’s far cheaper for this type of worker than it is for the C-suite making these awful decisions in the first place.
