HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls HP Inc is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries. The wait time was added on Tuesday, February 18, according to internal communications seen by The …
Dear Sir,
I wish to complain most strongly about the next letter. I do not know what it says in advance and I think that's a sign of just how degraded our society has become these days.
This kind of thing would not have happened when I was a lad, I would have been chopped in half with a pickled herring had I tried such a devious trick.
Best wishes for a happy 1938,
Brigadier Sir Michael George Foot Graham Bartleby-Frere KC KD KCBO RCD RCBO KBO HTTP FRES (Mrs)
They were only exercising simple self-preservation. If anything went wrong with the thing, you'd naturally try to contact HP, and being rightously bothered by the lack of any semblence of human reason on the support line, you'd be back to the shop with pitchforks and various garden implements to have your just revenge. Who can blame them?
Between this, region locking their printers so you can't take it with you when you move and buy new ink at the new country, locking their printers from using third party cartridges, and a bullshit ink subscription service that tricks you into signing up using dark patterns (ie confusing and misleading phrasing) and can't even be opted out at all if you bought certain printers (again, dark patterns- those printers are priced cheaply to trick your not-so-tech-savvy grandma into buying them), it makes you wonder why people even still buy HP printers. In all honesty I'd have moved to something else long ago (and I did, when the last HP in my parents' home croaked I convinced them to move to Canon. I myself currently use a cheap thermal transfer printer from some unheard of Chinese company called Phomemo. The print output is as bad as a tabletop fax machine from 30 years ago (and is based on the same tech) but for tax documents, it does what it's supposed to do. I'd have loved to get a dot matrix printer given that the cartridge on my last one cost USD2 and lasted two fricking years before I had to replace it, but they seem to have went up in price tremendously since the turn of the millennium. Plus, no portable battery powered version).
After being extremely rude to their fuckwit chatbot, I was told 10 mins phone wait time to speak to a person. I hung on and seemingly the chatbot didn't have the level of clearance to resolve my problem anyway as the Internet is too insecure. Who knew!
Probably just how it was pasted in. It's really Hebrew (I even checked in Translate, because mine's well rusty now.) The original may not even have been punctuated.
"Okay, so let him speak in Hebrew. He'll break his teeth, and I'll understand him regardless."
Which is why its such a breath of fresh air to receive good support from a friendly human, in good time over the phone.
This is how companies can differentiate themselves from the likes of HP, who's products are now Hardly Purchasable.
Laserjet 4 was my last good experience...
Agreed, until I had to move the bloody thing. Built like a battleship and weighs about the same.
I was very sad when my one died.
Old age I reckon as I'd used it for about 15 years and it wasn't new when I picked it up.
the LJ4 had a common fault
the lens in the laser assembly used to get filthy leading to faint print
the official HP answer was replace the laser assembly at a stupid cost, mine was undo the screws and clips on the top go the assembly, and with some IPA and lint free cloth clean the lens (NOT the rotating mirror) and they were like new again
I gave up on HP laptops years ago, cheap rubbish, and HP desktops you can see are built to a price to maximise profits, since they bought 3com their networking has gone down hill as well
Laserjet 5 here. Got it for free, resurrected it during COVID (bad fuser, stripped gears) and it has been sitting in the corner on standby, printing whenever I ask it to, still on its first cartridge, since then.
If I ever buy another printer, it will be another refurbed antique Laserjet.
The worst part is they have been doing these dark patterns for more than a decade. Almost 20 years ago, a lot of laptops came with a 'free' unsolicited HP printer (that is how they used to try to hook consumers as they already had enterprise). You would find out the pain when you had to replace the cartridge that HP wanted payback for the 'free' printer.
> If this is for calls to a revenue generating phone number (i.e. many NGNs) then they can expect a call from OFCOM.
If this is for calls to a revenue generating number then I hope they can expect a call from the Fraud Office with appropriate criminal charges for Directors and baned from the gravy train holding directorships.
If this is for calls to a revenue generating phone number
A quick web search for "HP telephone support" produces a London number.
But i do wonder about the way companies look at such things. What it means is that if there is just one incoming call then the person who could answer it will have to sit there idle for 15mins until they can handle it.
Reminds me of a meeting I was in with BT back in the 90's about their proposed X.400 mail service (fortunately SMTP won here).
They proudly stated that they would have a first and second class mail available (part of the standard) and would delay the second-class ones.
So I mischievously asked them how much additional storage they envisaged they'd need to store these delayed message which they could otherwise have sent on.
The expressions as they totally failed to answer this were priceless.
"Reminds me of a meeting I was in with BT back in the 90's about their proposed X.400 mail service (fortunately SMTP won here)."
X.400, a reason for needing A0 Business Cards (to fit your email address onto) lol
Yes having email addresses that embedded the identity of your email provider was obviously a winning idea (with Internet email you have the option of using your own domain name, with X.400 providers you didn't)
"I serm to remember freeserve started with a similar model."
It certainly used to the case, at least in the early days of the UK telco market opening up to competition, that when phone calls were made within the UK the originating telco had to pay termination fees to the destination telco (per-minute charges AFAIK).
Obviously if the terminating telco was not BT then it was in that telco's interest to have ISPs using them for Internet dialup as most of the calls would originate from BT customers. Therefore it made sense for those telcos and ISPs to make deals to split the termination fees (which for the ISP would bring in more revenue than the typical "tenner a month" ISP customer subscription).
I live in a UK town of 13000 people. WHSmith has just told us they are closing the branch and with it the PO will disappear. Now we have one, but it’s in the middle of a housing estate and realistically 70% of its customers will have to drive there - many of them (pensioners etc) don’t drive. Those who do will cause massive parking congestion.
Ironically there is a Delivery & Sorting office in the town centre that could support a walk in branch but they won’t.
The ATM that was in the PO has gone, the one in Sainsbury’s has been shut, the Co-op had one but they have closed that branch too so now there is one single ATM in the town centre. Of course, several of the high street shops only accept cash.
People need to print receipts, invoices, delivery notes, labels, etc etc - not all of thar became electronic only.
I spent last weekend printing and framing photos for an exhibition (not on an HP printer). Maybe one day e-ink frames will change that too, but right now they are not up to the task yet.
Now I have to ask a quote for a 14"x70" print... I can't do that myself. Probably it will print faster than the HP evil delay...
I think I've got a roll of unexposed Kodachrome 64 somewhere, if you'd like to buy it? Obviously it's worth is naff all because Kodak were the only people who could develop it, and they took the process with them into their corporate grave (excepting unless you want to use it as inferior B&W film).
As far as I know, the process Kodachrome uses isn't a secret, it's just complicated and highly impractical for a small-scale or home setup.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-14_process
In fact, the burden of supporting the complex infrastructure required to process Kodachrome when the numbers were no longer there to justify it is most likely the main reason it was discontinued. (By the end, all Kodachrome was being processed via a single lab in the US).
Also, Kodak went through bankruptcy, but not liquidation- legally speaking, they're still the same company, albeit a pale shadow of their former selves and reduced to hawking ot their name to licensees regardless.
This article is also interesting. Apparently the chemicals required have been discontinued, but despite this someone has managed to make them themselves *and* process old Kodachrome in full colour:-
Or simply that we can have dozens of physical photos (printed on my canon inkjet) in nice frames all round the house, often in a size that would have been unimaginably expensive in my younger days, for the cost of the one not very large digital frame we have. And the physical frames don't stop showing photos if the power goes off.
When my mother passed away a couple of years ago, I had to sort through her family archives. Found so many pictures and documents from my grandparents (and their parents, even) from the 20s/30s/40s. What a treasure trove of family memories and discoveries that was. Wartime love-letters, even old tradesmans’ receipts (my great-grandfather apparently had his house wired for the new-fangled electricity in around 1920, costing him a non-trivial number of pounds, shillings, and pence…)
Will future generations pore over our e-mails and saved memes with such reverence?
Add all the add all the community items, notices, small posters, invitations., for, say, a community hall, or a library or sports centre. Then the small business items. Menus, price lists, etc..Then all the institutional items. Leaflets, newsletters, signs, certificates,schedules notices, team lists/rotas etc, for say a church, or a Scouts/Guides group, or a sports team. Then all the personal and family items, pictures for Granny, place settings for a party, hymn sheets for a wedding, There's still an awful lot of printing going on out there. Much of it with inkjets. Many of those inkjets are pretty decent these and have become much better value, Canon and Epson are pretty decent.. But I wouldn't buy HP under any circumstances. I'd rather sharpen my finger and write in my own blood.
My wife's a minister of a small church, and they get through volumes of paper. As IT assistant, I refused to even look at inkjets, they run a Brother 3230 duplex colour, and a tiny old brother 1210w B&W and they both just chug.
Just wish she was happier with the photos they get from the 3230. "My old samsung laser used to print better photos" "No it didn't they all had a blue cast"
"Many of those inkjets are pretty decent these and have become much better value, Canon and Epson are pretty decent"
Print quality of my Canon is excellent......when it's not clogged. And it's got refillable tanks so the ink isn't too expensive per ml. Sadly seems to spend more time wasting ink during head cleaning routines to clear the bloody nozzles than it does printing, so the saving on ink is lost in waste.
A bit disappointing that after what, four decades in the inkjet business Canon can't make SOHO printers that don't clog.
>>Do people still print things?
Yeh - 2 million sheets a year at last count... I like machines that don't break down and have an engineer on 4h response via web callout or even a phone call...
At home? not so much; still I have an old (>10 years) HP 1320 that does the job. Only put 1 toner in it and a pickup roller refurb.
that's a nice idea. although it fails at which it has to be proven a willful lie.
populists tend to belief in their crap, so what they are spouting may be false, but not a willful lie.
plappering out what a third party told them, feign responsibility and denying willfulness also gets around to tell false statements.
Yup. We are living in the Post Truth Era, where feelings and beliefs (no matter how convoluted) count for more than actual facts and evidence.
Bullshit is king; it's pretty much always been king, but these days the bullshitters don't even try to hide it. They don't have to, since there are plenty of credulous fools out there who will believe anything told to them.
Seems that these clowns do not understand that people use the telephone because their digital support channels have failed to provide the information that the customer needs.
HMRC is particularly guilty of this, the website is generally an unmitigated failure and even the simplest question can't be handled by it.
But since their outsourced mess continues to hit the false metrics that were dreamt up by someone without a clue we'll continue to have to suffer this way in the name of progress.
AI bots have just added to the torture.
That simply is not true. There's a load of useful information on various gov.uk websites, calculators for tax and SSP etc. True, for more complex queries you'll have to read the rules and calculate yourself, and finding some of the information is not always straightforward, but to say it can't even handle simple questions really is inaccurate.
I'm sure it's true that the ability to do self service on the website is lacking, although it must be better than it was years ago.
However, that is quite some way from saying there is no information to answer the simplest of queries, when there clearly is. 'Handling a very simple query entirely specific to my NI number' is entirely different.
The monolithic gov.uk big font simple language never gives confidence that your slightly unusual case is convered as you follow up and down or around until you've completed a circuit, having has to use an outside seach engine that can handle AND not just OR. It's also their mistakes that need to be sorted, which online just doesn't (e.g one computer is working on 52 weeks another on 53 and 4-6 weeks to get from one to the other). It would be good to have a press zero to skip the pious crud about using the wonderous online as you wouldn't be using the phone if you didn't have to. We don't know if there is a 15 minute wait, but I find the staff as helpful as they can be, even if most of the time it's not this number (given online or on the letter that has arrived in the post) that deals with this aspect, and they can't transfer the call but here's the next number to ring and be told the same tales plus assurance that this is not the number for whatever is the currently fashionable problem that too many people are ringing about.
People use the telephone because their digital support channels have failed
The thing is, the people sitting around developing "user stories" for digital channels don't have much imagination beyond their own personal circumstances.
I recently needed to pay in a cheque on behalf of an elderly relative. Not possible using the banking app because I'm not the account holder. The only bank branch within 10 miles was closed owing to being vandalised. Can't do it at a Post Office because I don't have printed paying-in slips. Can't order those via the app either.
And then I needed to pay in a cheque to myself. Not possible using the banking app because it was a company cheque and not a personal cheque and the app doesn't recognise the format. I did get through to the help line and was told I'd have to go to branch. The was open and which had a cheque deposit machine. I then got an e-mail from the bank chastising me for using the machine instead of the app.
The aim of these digital channels seems to be to offer only 50% of the full range of services and keep the remaining users at arm's length so that their dissatisfaction never appears in the metrics.
"The aim of these digital channels seems to be to offer only 50% of the full range of services and keep the remaining users at arm's length so that their dissatisfaction never appears in the metrics."
When you deal with people, they can almost always sort out anything for you, or pass you up the chain until you reach someone who can. When you deal with automated digital systems, they are programmed to deal with the most common issues only. If you have an uncommon issue, they'd rather you took your business elsewhere than update their systems to cope with "edge case".
"Seems that these clowns do not understand that people use the telephone because their digital support channels have failed to provide the information that the customer needs."
Such as reporting a fault to your ISP who will happily tell you man, many, many times while on hold trying to call them that you can check the status of your connection and all sorts of other woderful fault find stuff on their website. I HAVE NO FUCKING CONNECTION. I CAN'T GET TO YOUR WEBSITE. Oh, and I have a shit phone signal here, no matter the provider.
Do they honestly think that everyone *wants* to speak to a script-reading call centre drone who possesses broken English, who cannot understand what is being requested? The last thing anyone wants is to deal with them as it is so difficult. When it gets to that point I've exhausted *every* avenue - google, reddit. newsgroups, crappy HP website. The call centre is truly the last resort.
HP are absolute garbage, both in hardware and support.
Apologies for the rant.
Think HP is bad? Try British Airways. The people in their call center have a way of pronouncing English that is indecipherable (and I have traveled extensively in Africa and Asia so I am used to people who aren't native speakers). As a bonus they're using VoIP over a dial up modem although I am now thinking that may be deliberate degradation so that you give up.
That wasn't the rant. This is the rant: we're in England and a fire is burning towards our home in Los Angeles. The evacuation area is by then, six streets away. Called BA to change the tickets to get home and save whatever we can. This isn't an emergency, we are told. No help on the change fees which there would be if it was an emergency. Asked to talk to a supervisor which apparently just meant someone else. Told that our emergency isn't BA's problem. The change fees on the ticket cost 1/2 what we paid for the round trip.
Ah, I feel your pain. Two years ago my nieces came out here to Oregon for a visit; their tickets had been booked through BA. Cutting a long story short, when the time came to check in for their return flight, it was impossible, because they'd been bounced onto a later outbound flight without updating the appropriate record in the airline's systems, so it looked to BA as though they were a no-show - hence, return flight cancelled.
An hour on the phone waiting to speak to a BA agent, and when I did get through, I found all the problems you mentioned. Impenetrable accent, crackly low-quality line, and a side-order of "not my problem" surliness. I eventually winkled out of him that in fact, the flight had been a code-share operated by American Airlines, and that I needed to talk to them. Great, why didn't you tell me at the outset?
So I called AA, and after 3 rings got through to a lovely lady in (judging by her accent) Atlanta GA, who couldn't have been more helpful and friendly. Sorted it all out ("no worries honey, we'll get y'all straightened out") and did more in that 10 minute call to convert me to an AA customer than umpteen advertising campaigns could have done.
Short version: screw BA. They're Spirit/Wizz Air levels of service, with Emirates pricing.
Then you've never flow Air New Zealand. They are good.
Nice to know, we'll be doing an entire lap of the globe with them soon.
I am slightly concerned that a number of their B787s are grounded due to engine problems, as I don't want to miss out on the sky couch on the 16 hour first leg of the return flight.
"In my experience, any airline with a country name in the airline name is shit."
You need to get out more. Singapore, Emirates and Qatar are excellent airlines. Shit countries mind you...
And there are plenty of shit airlines that don't have a country in their name - Ryanair and Sleasyjet spring to mind.
I have an HP 16C1 "Programmer's Calculator" (computes in decimal, hex, octal, and binary) that I bought somewhere around 1982 that's been dropped, kicked, run over by office chairs, and suffered who knows what other mishap and abuse and it, too, is still running just fine. I've only had to replace the batteries once in 40-some years of use.
I don't use it all that often any longer but it's sitting in my desk drawer and works every time I need it.
Over the years, I've had two or three HP laptops and they've all fallen apart after only moderate use2, and that's not to mention the abominable WiFi performance.
I'm not a big believer in the Good Old Days, since mostly they weren't all that good, but if there were such a thing, this little gadget is an exemplar
I'm baffled as to how things got broken so badly at what was, by all reports and by personal experience, a good quaility company.
Bean counters, I suppose.
_________________
1 I actually had to check on line to confirm that because the little nameplate has long since fallen off, as have the little rubber feet on its bottom.
2 The plastic plate covering the hinge seems to break on me for reasons I can't explain. I've had Dells and Acers used in similar applications and never has a problem.
I have a HP 16C too and it still works as well as the day it was bought which was some time around 1977/1978. Like you I don't get much use out of it anymore but it is without a doubt the best engineered calculator I ever bought. My last scientific TI calculator lasted less than a year, the keys stopped working which made getting results difficult.
I've told this anecdote around here in the past, but... in a previous life, my employer had standardised on IBM Thinkpads (yes, IBM, that tells you how long ago it was). Solid, reliable, could be used to stop a parabellum round at point blank range...
One year, the IT department decided to hand out HP Elitebooks, as a pilot, and I was "selected" to receive one.
All seemed to be OK, until I was at a company training conference in Vegas-or-wherever; seated in the front row of the lecture room, I was typing notes as the instructor spoke. Suddenly and without warning the Scroll Lock key (why? it's not even as if I was using it!) popped off the laptop's keyboard, flew through the air, and landed in front of the instructor. Who without breaking his flow picked it up and handed it back to me.
I swapped back to a Thinkpad on my return to the office.
Then I'll repeat my HP printer anecdote. Which I've used on El Reg previously Since it's why I vowed never to buy anything HP ever again.
That printer told me I could/should update the software. I downloaded and ran the update programme as instructed, which fell over after deleting the current drivers. It refused to install the new software, because one specific .dll was still in place, and permission was denied to delete that dll even though it was an HP installed dll being replaced by an HP software update and it would neither overwrite, nor ignore that .dll either The four levels of uninstall routines that- unaccountably- HP provided to download for uninstalling printer software still wouldn't touch it i.e.. The software for the HP printer was so Byzantine that it had this complex uninstallation software available on their website, with four different levels of uninstaller for use when the previous one didn't work!!!! And it still wouldn't uninstall the dll that their own software had previously installed! Nothing I could do manually would get rid of that accursed.dll either. So the new drivers would not install. Falling over when it came to write that particular dll. I couldn't use the printer and it went to land fill, after weeks of trying.
And to make it even worse, it was the same fucking version number, so it didn't even need replacing, it could just have skipped over it!!!
“Apparently HP doesn't want to deal with consumers anymore.”
I’m not sure that HP wan’t to deal with anyone anymore!
And, I know it’s technically a separate company but has anyone tried to spec up a server on the HPE (HP Enterprise) website recently? I’m sure that it is one of Dante’s circle of Hell!
That reminds me of the time I needed support with an HP "Data Vault". Every mention of this thing had dropped off HP's website, although the "MediaSmart Server" (same hardware, slightly different software, as I understand it) was still mentioned and supported.
When I asked HP I got told "no, that's not an HP product (despite having an HP logo on it), you need to ask HPE instead", while simultaneously sounding like they were chastising me for not knowing that in the first place.
I stopped bothering with HP servers when they decided that firmware updates would only be available to people with a current warranty... that might or might not be the case now but I'm never going to bother to check.
Mind you, even back then it wasn't worth the stress of messing with HP's website, I just emailed my requirements to a reseller who came up with the goods.
... but I don't need any further reasons to avoid HP like the plague. I think things like a printer telling me that it doesn't approve of where I purchase my ink from and therefor self-destructs are a clear enough message about what they think about their customers.
What atrocious customer service. HP are lying by attributing this forced 15 minute wait to "call volumes".
It's understandable to want to drive efficiency, it makes business sense. I like talking to people in general, but I would prefer to quickly resolve issues myself and avoid poorly trained, poorly motivated staff who possibly struggle to communicate effectively in English.
A properly trained and effective AI - sad to say it'd be preferable.
A decent knowledge base on their website - preferable again.
But crappy AI chatbot, crappy knowledge base and crappy human support once you get through is real reason to avoid HP and other foolish companies also doing it.
Happy customers = repeat business.
"Happy customers = repeat business"
repeat business != new lead conversion
new lead conversion = sales bonus
new lead conversion = growth in customer database = reporting business growth = Management bonus
happy customer != short term personal benefit from bonuses
I hate all of 'em, but I reserve my Special Hatred® for the ones that just give up and go back to the beginning of their script, if you keep selecting the "No that doesn't even remotely answer my question" option, around and around in a loop, forever.
One company that we deal with in particular, seemingly has no contact options of any kind, other than a moronic chatbot, which of course has so few response options that it's clearly just a token gesture, never intended to be actually used, just so they can tick the "Extensive customer support" checkbox in the marketing literature.
So I suppose it's only fitting, then, that everyone here uses a marketing contact at the aforementioned company, who exposed his email address to us unintentionally, as their first as only point of contact with them.
And every time we email him for any reason unrelated to marketing (which is basically every email), he politely agrees to help us, but reminds us that he is not the correct contact for e.g. tech support. And every time, we thank him, but politely point out that his company doesn't actually have any support contacts.
We do this partly in the vain hope that he might actually retort with an actual contract address. But of course, he never does.
Ah, you are taking about o2 / Telefonica? Or the train company (where are the booking conditions? Am I allowed to take this train since mine is delayed? What are the rules?) Construct a good website where I can find the relevant information. And no, having a "Forum" where "experts" "answer" questions is not helpful (hi , Microsoft).
Yeah, those chat bots are actually less than helpful. They are a stupid waste of time and resources. I feel the bile rising, I think I could spit lacework into steel plates.
The Microsoft version of this got my back up just in the last few days.
I discovered that I could no longer have custom icons for URLs. Only a generic browser icon, identical for every url, as the Properties/change icon option is not there for url links. I waned to do this, because I want to be able to see which icon is for which of the three or four urls on my desktop
Searching the responses to this question offered by Microsoft's amateur lead forum just told the world that it couldn't be done. Full Stop.
It f****ing well can! Despite their ignorant bullshit. I've lost count of the number of times that an inquiry about something like this, i.e. something that Microsoft has randomly decided that they don't want to encourage any more will have forum members declaring that it can't be done. Ignorance or just shills? I’ll leave you to decide.
30 seconds with chatGPT and I had the solution* that their forum says wasn't possible.
*Not difficult. Point the icon to the browser, not the url, with the url added after the path. You can then change the icon for that link, like any other link to an exe.
But the link opens the url when you click on it. The only downside (mostly it's a downside for Microsoft not the users) is that the link specifies which browser it opens in. e.g. "c:\...\firefox.exe www.mysite.com" which is fine by me. But of course it means that the link always opens the browser I want and not a default one that Microsoft might palm off onto me at some future update.
"everyone here uses a marketing contact at the aforementioned company, who exposed his email address to us unintentionally, as their first as only point of contact with them."
Perhaps the marketing chap is the only human (stretching a point perhaps) in the company the rest being transdimensional brain sucking aliens with whom any communication invariably results semiliquid brain leaking from ones ears, eyes and nostrils.
Unsurprisingly actually sounds like most large organisations today. When did the Vogons take over Earth? Presumably hired by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Just wait for the poetry....
Hope they're now fearing for their job as this scheme has leaked out and is about to cause disastrous damage to sales as HP gets crossed off myriad approved supplier lists. And let it be a lesson to managerdrones everywhere about the consequences of deliberately making your customers lives worse in the hope of skimming off marginal extra profits.
There is really nothing more that HP may do to make me hate them more than I already do. I have stopped buying their products (computers, servers, printers, etc) since years ago.
- useless website, hard to navigate
- no firmware updates for servers if not under support
- DRM for printers
- crap quality all around in printers
- crap quality displays on notebooks
The last HP printer I loved was a laserjet 4000 series
The last HP server I loved was the Microserver Gen8
Thinking about it, I really don't mind this enshittification of their phone support because I DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE.
Add to the list:
(In Win7) Remove "classic" Laserjets from list of devices supported by Generic PCL5 driver.
This was done, as far as I can tell, to force people to upgrade their printers to those with DRM/subscription plans. My LJ5, which was working Just Fine on Win7, after a Windows update, suddenly...didn't. A new driver had been installed.
My LJ5 is on the network, and my Linux Mint system serves it out to Apple and Windows systems...which have no trouble printing to it. But add it alone as a printer to Win10? No can do. (There's someone on the Web who was smart enough to archive and make available, the last copy of the HP driver supporting PCL5 for these older printers, so with a little Googling, it may still be possible)
I did a little research, and this was one of the rare instances of Microsoft innocence. It was totally an HP move.
A lot of companies say things that sound like apologies when it is clear they don't mean it.
HP are not waiting for anything, so claiming that they are experiencing longer waiting times is a falsehood too.
Their message says:
""We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience."
If they were remotely honest about it, the message would be:
"You are experiencing long waiting times due to our deliberate policy, for which we are not sorry."
Perhaps for clarity, they should add:
"If you call again, we will make you wait again.", or maybe: "Please hang up and don't call us again. We really don't want to talk to you."
Phase 1: set up online chat bot
Phase 2: make phone calls as painful as possible (longer wait times, fewer agents, etc ...)
Phase 3: "enhance" chat bot with chat GPT, making it a lot worse than normal chatbot
Phase 4: enjoy the lowest possible %age of responded phone calls
Job done.
That is perfectly fine with me, they are on my never to buy from list so it will not get in my way. A lot of the parasite tech corporations are on it at the moment, along with many other thieving bastard corporations in other industries. I buy nothing from any of them unless absolutely necessary.
I find phone help and web help to generally be equally useless. The phone help asks the same questions and gives you the same responses as the online help does. It's almost like they are using the same script.
I have a question for all of the savvy web people out there. Has anyone ever had clearing their web browser cache fix anything? From my experience it should fix any problem because it is without a doubt the "fix" to try that I've heard most often when having a web related problem.
It fixes stuff for me relatively often, but I am talking about supporting a web forum with tens of thousands of users - I think we probably suggest it to a user about once every month or two, after checking there's nothing obviously wrong with their account on our end.
It works ~60% of the time. Might be specific to our software, obviously, and that's still a tiny error rate given the user base, but it does something some of the time!
Not only will this annoy the customer, it won't do much for the support staff. By the time the customer has sat on a phone line for 15 minutes they will be annoyed. And take it out on the call centre staff. Meaning any half decent ones will quit and support will be even worse.
Its fine... just means anyone who owns a HP will let everyone else know that HP stands for Hopeless Products.
Many years ago I was restoring some vintage electronic equipment. I needed a non invasive way of cleaning some brass/copper parts. I tried the various cleaning solvents, plus the usual oddities, such as dipping in coca cola, vinegar, etc. Eventually I tried submersing in a jar of HP Brown Sauce. Voila! After 2 days, Nice shiny new metal parts and contacts glistening in the light! I posted this result onto one of the related forums and received several replies stating that they were unaware that Hewlett Packard made brown sauce!
Having seen what the brown sauce did to dirty old metal, I have avoided any dietary contact with it ever since.
I've also avoided the other HP too for years. I recently ran out of printer paper and with no time to order online popped into my local stationary shop, expecting to pay 2-3 time the price for a pack. They only had HP branded paper available, which I declined to buy. I explained to the lady behind the counter what my aversion was to HP, and she was somewhat bemused as she had obviously never had anyone decline to buy paper before, but she then added "I've had several HP printers at home, and they never seem to last very long". I recommended she should look for other brands, maybe more expensive to buy outright, but a lot cheaper and more reliable over time.
First they force you to download firmware that they intentionally loaded to brick your printer that you purchased with your money. Then when they were being sued for doing that, they started this BS lie that the chips, which if I'm not mistaken they had the bright idea for in the first place, could carry viruses if you bought third party ink so they were trying to control where you spent your money.
And if that wasn't bad enough, they behave as if people are too ignorant to figure out that it's a lie.
Then they come up with this brilliant idea that you should rent a printer or just let them print it for you because they never keep your information or read your documents or ignore the fact that you deserve privacy because you gave it to them so you agreed.
So there's the DRM tactic they started in 2016 to try and force consumers away from 3rd party ink either by firmware updates or their "dynamic security" that they unsuccessfully tried to push as protection for the customer to avoid counterfeit ink. Even though customers gave them hell about it they still continue to try to do it.
Then there's the subscription based ink crap that gets you stuck with a s***** printer and expensive ass ink and is more wasteful for you than anybody else and also forces you to go online.
In 2020 they were sued in Belgium for disabling HP printers who used third-party ink.
2022 the class action for deceptive business practices but they just paid a settlement instead of actually fixing anything and 'no paying the settlement does not mean they're guilty' but yes it does.
2023 more legal crap because they lock scan functions on the printers just because they didn't have ink even though you don't scan using ink.
They've been caught disabling printers even if you bought them out right and you weren't paying for them somewhere because they hard code planned obsolescence in their firmware which I think everybody does that now anyway and nobody says a damn thing about it.
And they sell the printers at a cheap price and then they jack up the price of the flipping ink and yet people continue to go make them successful.
If you don't buy their crap, they can't treat you like sh*t.
I work in the Customer Success department (yes, management here really thinks that's a cool name) for a company that shall not be named. Not HP, thankfully. Here's what it looks like on the inside. You aren't going to like it, so go ahead with the downvotes.
There is a tech support phone number, but only because that was an expedient thing to do when the company was a startup. The poor guy who answered it back then was also the one and only engineer/coder/QA tech/documentation author. We've grown up since then: that guy is now head of engineering, we have a whole tech support team with a ticketing system and everything, and no we don't have the staff to take phone calls. Management won't let us take the phone number off our website though. So when you call us, you get a voicemail asking you to please open a ticket instead, or at least describe your problem. Many of our customers, bless them, do that. The special ones leave a cranky message that doesn't describe their problem but does demand we call them back. Which we don't because we don't have the staff to do that.
In our users' defense, the last time we created a PDF manual was three years ago and our products have evolved quite a bit since then. We have an online knowledge base that sucks pretty bad, and behind management's back I sneak away from the support queue when I can to make the KB suck a little less, one article at a time. We are great with tickets though, as everyone who sets down the phone and creates a ticket discovers.
Management naturally doesn't authorize any improvements to the KB or the ticketing system, being oh so old fashioned. Nope, my assigned project for Q1 2025 is to pour a big bottle of AI all over the Customer Success department. With any luck I'll find a way to have an AI agent answer the damn phone for us and indirectly push users to open tickets.
Far too many companies are outright hostile to their customers. And far too many customers think it's OK.
But it never ends well for either one.
There are entire YouTube Channels about how once very large, world dominating, seemingly untouchable, infallible, companies shot themselves in the foot thinking customers OWED THEM business and it was a god given, heaven ordained right and they could just have their way with customers, la di da.
Until one day, it wasn't.
And almost every instance of failure was the above cause. Fucking over customers.
I’ve got two HP Z800s and three DL380Ps (G8) and I think I paid a grand total of $200 for all of it, including at least 2TB of ram sticks.
I blew another $100 apiece for some Tesla P4s and consequently have some hugely capable iron downstairs.
I fire up one of the DL380Ps “occasionally” to run the deepseek, but I really don’t have use for all this junk. If I care to I might run some CFD simulations, or something.
What do you do with HP equipment? I have just as much but for IBM-branded equipment. I betcha I’ve got 30+ Intel Xeons kicking around, not even counting the loose ones…
It's just more of the same. They really don't understand that people call the helpline as a last resort. Though it's pointless anyway. You'll only get some offshore droid telling you something you already knew. Online chat isn't any use either, just more "do the needful" bollocks. And self-help isn't any good, because all the self-help FAQs assume that everything is working fine and will never admit that something can go wrong.
The only course of action is online forums or, if you have the money, buy another one. Which is precisely what they want you to do.
As for minimising company spend during warranty, it's perfect. It increases the bottom line and furthers the enshittification of everything.
A legally backed ombudsman should require the whole board/senior management of all companies, government departments and institutions (eg HP, HMRC, AXA Insurance etc) to attend recorded video conference calls (one each, not all together), where each of them will be required to find the answer to 5 supplied problems, using their own company's facilities. A separate call for each problem. They shouldn't be allowed to leave until they've got answers to all 5 problems.
Obviously, an AI would be required to check they don't use a safe-word/code for preferential treatment or access.
Instant fix, I think!
Years back purchased an HP Officejet from a UK high st. Store, yes it understood A4 etc., but the default was always Letter…
Discovered a way to change this, however, that caused the driver to fail Windows driver signing checks…
As for WiFi, had similar problems with laptops, manufactured in the US, the WiFi chip installed only supported the 11 channels permitted in the US, they did this because the chip was a few cents cheaper than the one that support RoW WiFi. However, you do need to check that your WiFi AP is actually correctly configured to announce its locale as UK/Europe, so client devices can modify their radio behaviour.
They did that to my elderly mother too. HP laptop and - being clueless about tech and me not answering my mobile - she rang the HP support line. Totally panicked about viruses. And she was so clueless, she couldn’t follow their instructions at all (fortunately). She hung up and got through to me this time. She was so distraught and panicked she was wailing, not sobbing, down the phone. Not something you ever forget. She had phoned the right number. Somebody said they would “call her back because there are a lot of problems with your laptop”. Cue scammer. I don’t know if HP’s support system is still corrupt because I chose not to give them a second chance.
Companies keep thinking AI and self-service websites can replace people. Well, it can, but not if you want to actually provide good customer support and solve issues.
The main reason I end up speaking to a representative is because the online system didn't work as expected, had limitations, or was just incapable of solving the slightly unusual situation. It's not out of choice. Something needs sorting, and it's beyond the limits of the programming.
Good luck to any representatives having to answer the calls after a fake 15 minute delay.
I have shelves of HP equipment. It's lovely stuff. The later bits are called Agilent. I haven't got anything called Keysight.
I did have an HP printer but it broke, so I replaced it with a Brother.
I still have an HP computer. It's much, much quieter than the equivalent Dell. Getting a bit old though. Not sure what to replace it with. Maybe it's still worth buying their ex-corporate systems - perhaps a Z600 or Z800. Would't waste my time on their laptops.
#
I have two HP laptops and the one I'm using to write this on is a Probook 470 G5 and was bought in September 2018. It's never let me down unless you count automatically upgrading to Win11 a while back, lol.
However I do get the points being made here that if you call a support line it's usually because you've exhausted all the alternatives and forcing a sneaky and underhand 15 minute wait on you is a shitty thing to do.
My colleague had a visit from a HP Printer salesman, he informed the sales rep he wasn't interested due to the long wait times to get a service call logged, especially when he could wrap up a call to Canon printers in about a minute.
The sales guy scoffed at this, said that they had improved the wait time figures, fortunately my colleague was about to log a call & so demonstrated the almost instantaneous phone pickup by a real person, once provided with a serial number & a brief outline of the fault he had a ticket number in about 45 seconds.
"When you can match that service, I'll consider buying from you!"
Just then the local repair subcontractor rang to make an appointment to visit.
HP slunk out the door never to return..... (Icon)
I know of this multi-billion dollar company and a darling to Wall Street that have something similar.
This company has multiple "zones" of TAC: North and Latin America, Asia (located somewhere in India), China, Korea, Japan, Europe and Middle East & Africa. The US and Europe market is number 1 and number 2, respectively, in sales. Everywhere else is "meh" if not "a burden". Will explain below why this paragraph is even here.
Some hired a numbers person and slotted into Operations. And this person started putting some unrealistic KPI. One of those was the number of minutes a ticket is languishing in "Waiting for Company" (to respond) vs "Waiting for Customer" (to respond). And the KPI is skewed against "Waiting for Company" by a very wide margin.
So the challenge was put down to all TAC managers: Bring the "Waiting for Company" down or else. One of the option is to increase "Waiting for Customer". And how, exactly, does one increase the "Waiting for Customer" KPI? Simples: Dumb down the customer-facing TAC. For example: Every email I get from TAC send the case to the "Waiting for Customer" status. Any email I respond/send to the vendor and the TAC status changes to "Waiting for Company". One of the tricks they would do is email the customer with requests for more information at 7pm during weekdays or 6pm on a Friday.
NOTE: Since North America and Europe are numbers 1 and 2 in sales, they are "exempted" from this program and "open season" to clients located in Asia and Oceana.
The original memo states mentioning increased call volumes, but since that’s clearly a lie, they ended up putting in messages about increased weight times, with only the implication, not explication, of call volumes.
I think that’s the same kind of implication they use when they imply they will give you support.
Never mind how they’re going to use the “reduced call volumes” internally to reduce jobs but “increased call volumes” externally to keep bleeding people off to useless solutions until they get frustrated and stop trying.
How very “used car saleman”.
I found that if you talk like Prof Stanley Unwin to chatbots, such as "Now, as eve on his deep approach, his eye on the moon. All time sometime deep joy of a full moon scinty laden dangly in the heavenly bode." It complete buggers up their systems :-)
Deep Joy!
Paul
Is it all their support or just the general public, with enterprise support being a human? I've usually exausted everything before I have to call them anway.
Phone the number, go make tea with alarm set for 14min 30 seconds.
And, for those saying they wouldn't buy another HP printer. What multifunction inkjet do they recommend thats good quality but not so expensive to run?
Utter barstewards. The enshittification of all customer experience continued - actually it seems to be speeding up. HP were already off my personal list but I’ve been assisting someone (as a favour) in the purchase of 5 laptops for their small company. And - somewhat reluctantly - I was leaning to an HP model. Now I can knock it off the list altogether. So there’s that.
...this is a pretty common practice in support, although not as overt as simply adding a 15 minute wait.
All those labyrinthine menus you have to navigate on a support line are designed to slow you down. Including asking for you information again when you get transferred even if you've already given it.
An MSP I used to work at a looooong time ago used to have different pricing as well for different response times to encourage people to wait...for example, a response within 1 hour was billed at £70 an hour, but a response within 10 days was billed at £20 an hour...this ultimately bit them in the ass though because it left their system wide open to exploitation by the engineers who fancied a bit of extra curricular.
For example, if a customer wanted a same day response, but didn't want to pay the premium and engineer could log a 10 day ticket at the £20 an hour rate, but decide to help out the customer on their lunch break or "after hours"...and charge them around £30 an hour (double for a weekend), which is a greater than 50% discount for the same engineer (even at the double weekend rate, which is the best time to wangle some project work...so I've been told)...then when the ticket became due in 10 days, simply "action" it, add all the notes and close it with only 1 hour of time logged...those engineers who did this (and I'm not suggesting I was one, the fact I managed to find the deposit for a flat in 3 months is just a coincidence, shut up!) would favour being on the early shift. Starting at 7am and finishing at 2pm...because you'd get a nice 3-4 hours before business close to get in some "charitable" work. Doing this sort of thing I could...I mean the other engineers could earn twice their salary in side jobs...all properly billed with tax paid via self assessment. Although you should be warned, when your tax code adjustment comes in it does raise some eyebrows and you may end up with an uncomfortable meeting or two...just tell them it's unrelated work, you're helping someone out after hours in a completely different industry. Honest.
Many moons ago I worked on some software for an HMRC call centre - they deliberately added several layers to the IVR (I seem to remember we recommended no more than 2 layers, I think they chose 5) to keep people off the call waiting queue stats, and potentially hope they will give up and abandon the call. Seems others have learnt from their example!
I cannot put into words how much I detest phone support. Why should I spent my time engaging with such a pisspoor synchronous realtime system when there is a much better asynchronous batch option available that also automatically archives the exchange for compliance ?
That is a separate issue to the fact that if HP made decent kit, they wouldn't have so many people needing support.
From someone who spent most of their career in QA, whenever I call a company's support line and get the " high volume of calls" message, it tells me it's time to seek an alternative supplier (if possible). A high number of support calls means a high number of problems and insufficient resources allocated. One sign of a business in trouble is when they need to increase their customer support resources.
Large support centres should be a last resort - getting the product or service right first time should be the priority. The last-stop support call centre is often outsourced because management don't know how to sort out their own mess - or are too focussed on their profit line and burning opex is easier to hide than capex (especially when the hit on any bonus is then deferred).
Are they going to authorize a user to return their broken, under-warranty printer from the web? I'm thinking I'm going to be real passed off because I have to wait 15 minutes more to get a return authorization to ship it back.
Let's not forget their latest printers go into sleep mode and can't wake themselves up. The solution is to unplug the unit, wait, and plug it back in. Does anyone remember how this used to jack up inkjets way back when? Am I shortening the lifetime of the unit by using this hack?
I swear, HP is committed to corporate suicide, and they think everything is fine.
The funny thing is that HP has been employing dark patterns even before the term dark patterns was coined. More than a decade ago I was having an issue reinstalling HP printer drivers on XP. I called tech support and his advise was just to buy a new HP printer! And they have never stopped innovating in shady practices. An absolute dumpster fire of a company.
Sounds like time for everyone with a malicious sense of humor to call HP service.lines with the most inane questions, since most of us can just go on about our day in the comforting knowledge that "I'm on hold" is an excuse to not entertain boring coworkers or other interruptions. Tie up the lines and give the actual customer support people a bunch of easy and fast support ticket cleared metrics. Win win!
The ONLY reason people are using the phone to contact you is that your online tools ALREADY FAILED, and they just DO NOT WORK. Most of the time the problem we are having is not even an option in your endless lists of foolishness that we have to pick from, on our way down the endless tunnel into the black hole you call "digital self solve". Actually you should call it "digital self love", because that's what you are displaying when you treat your customers like this.
If you want to have your people spend less time on the phone helping customers, first of all, design your hardware and your software to work properly in the first place. If someone needs your online support, you have already failed. Once you have already failed, your first concern should be your customer's time that you are wasting. You should have an expert who knows the solution to any possible problem be the person who answers the phone. That way the problem is solved in one minute so you and your customer are both given a good solution.
"Warranty Cost Efficiencies" are achieved by eliminating the problems in advance, so the customers do not have to experience them in the first place. Your incentive for doing this should be an extremely high cost to you in giving perfect customer support. Your goal in customer support should be to make your customer happy that the problem happened because the solution turns out better than it would have been if everything was perfect. Lowering the cost of customer support gives you an incentive to give your customers more and worse problems. This is the opposite of what you should be doing.
Sure, using their online "help" site ("... you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means...")
I would ALREADY have looked at their online reference site before even trying to call. And quite likely I found their online site to be a steaming pile of dogshit.
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