it wos The Reg "wot won it,", indeed.. have a ---->

Ok, which member of the Reg worked for The Sun?

Those at HP thought this policy wouldn't become public knowledge and that there wouldn't be a big negative backlash really are incompetent.

Clearly they will be getting a promotion......

Um ... this is HP. Did you think they had any competent people in management? These are the same people who changed from Hewitt-Packard into Horrible-Products.

[1]The chap deserves to have his name spelled properly, at least

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hewlett

Those at HP thought this policy wouldn't become public knowledge and that there wouldn't be a big negative backlash really are incompetent.

Catbert (the evil HR director) would have got this right.

Clearly this policy is to make phoning so unpleasant that customers will take other options. Such as giving up, and hoping the problem will go away on its own. Once it's worked, you can then make 50% of your call centre staff redundent.

But this way makes you look evil, when you inevitably get caught.

Correct procedure is to have a hiring freeze, staff turnover in call centres is pretty high. Staff numbers will drop rapidly and naturally, causing wait times to rise and saving all the embarrassment of getting caught.

If natural wasteage isn't fast enough, you could always try poisoning the offce coffee...

So people are generally phoning up after likely exhausting their family support techs and because the web site er sorry, digital channels have not solved their problem. Likewise a scan of Stack overflow, Reddit et al has proved fruitless. The chat bot thing has also drawn a blank (could have told you that anyway).

Then to add 15 mins to call wait sounds like that famous scene from The IT Crowd with Chis O’Dowd not picking up the ringing phone.. Except the caller will make coffee, play with the cat/dog or do other stuff and ask Siri or Alexa to remind them when 15 minutes is up and they need to pay attention again.

classic

Let's run that response through my Natural Intelligence platform...and we get..

"We made a dick move in how we manage inbound call queues and got found out, so we have had to back pedal and put out this statement in an attempt to convince you it was all part of a coherent plan and we know what we're are doing. ".

..and that we aren't doing it anyway by just cutting back on support staff.

...and we'll quietly re-introduce the 15 minute minimum wait time in a few months, after the kerfuffle has died down.

"and we'll quietly reintroduce ..."

Of course not. That'd be dumb. Do you think all big tech managers are idiots? What they'll do is introduce a random delay with average delay of 15 minutes. Or they'll introduce a ficticious queue counter that will inform the caller every two minutes that their call is very important to HP and they are now 171 from the top of the queue. Then slowly count it down. Or they'll just turn the whole support thing over to AI agents that make Clippy look helpful by comparison.

What do you think is more likely?

- HP reverse the change, tell you actual wait times and staff their call centers to minimise those wait times. Oh, and improve the "digital" options.

- HP double-down on their lies, by telling you it's a "real" wait rather than an artificially induced one?

...go and look up something called the Streisand Effect!

... die in a fire.

...and too late.

Indeed.

The same management is in place, so expect further dick moves in the name of cost-cutting==executive-bonus-increases.

My wallet has already beat feet away from HP.

To be fair, a 15-minute wait and then access to a competent human would have been a fantastic service. That was the plan, right?

Of course. If a human happened to pick up the ringing phone in the three seconds between the delay robot timing out and the line being automatically dropped.

"That's OK, we can do this the old fashioned way. We'll just not hire anyone to answer the phones."

HP certainly provide an "exceptional customer experience".

Their management metrics must be great! Well on the way to making sure customers are the exception.

It is difficult to think of a move more likely to antagonise their customers than forcing a 15 minute wait for 'help'.

I once tried to assemble an Ikea* flatpack chest of drawers. It simply did not fit together, and there were too few runners for the drawers. I got very frustrated and eventually drove all the way back to the Ikea store for a refund. I decided that I would accept a replacement, provided they assembled it first. The returns department in Ikea is a soul destroying place. The staff do not make eye contact with the angry customers, just refund your money without question, poor chaps.

Now just imagine being on the receiving end of an angry customer who knows he/she has been made to wait for 15 minutes for no valid reason . Merely for the sanity of their own call centre staff this had to stop. I heard story that the HMRC** telephone line voice recognition software was allowed to accept "I just want to pay my fucking taxes" as the reason for a call as so many 'customers' were seriously angry at the long wait for a response.

Pissed off icon, obvs.

*Other self-assembly furniture vendors are available, I believe, and this was some time last century, so they may have improved by now, and my experience may not be typical. Do not generalise form a single example.

**His Majesty's Revenue and Customs, responsible for income and other national tax collection in the UK. Local authorities collect local taxes.

Eclectic Man,

I've not seen a piece of flat-pack furniture with a missing piece since the 1990s (when it was incredibly common). I think the parts are picked electronically now - so there are far fewer errors.

I built a wheelie kitchen mini-table / worktop thing for Mum last year - which had all the pieces but one of the screw-holes was missing and had to be drilled. But that seems to be the worst problem you get nowadays.

Did it also have an extra, redundant hole in the other end?

A story I believe was in Mark McCormack's book 'What they Don't Teach you at Harvard Business School'*:

Mayor of a US city was to open a new major bridge by installing the final, gold rivet in the structure, then declaring it open. Now, obviously the bridge was structurally sound before the opening ceremony, and perfectly functional. Come the event, the mayor is presented with the golden rivet and gun.

No hole.

Mayor palms the rivet, declares the bridge open. Much applause.

Later Mayor asks what happened?

According to the contractor "There was a hole in that when it left the factory."

[I think the Register needs to have a survey to determine where all these missing holes have gone.]

* A rather interesting read from someone who actually ran a successful business

I believe the manufacturer of Polo mints used to steal any spare holes they could find. There was the great hole shortage of '97 where they didn't have enough in stock, so ever after they had bands of hole snatchers taking them to a large warehouse in Luton. Hence why Luton is known as the biggest hole in the UK.

"hence why".

Make it stop please.

"Hence why Luton is known as the biggest hole in the UK."

Unhappily relocated workers were said to call Lllantrant the hole with a Mint in it.

Extra AND redunant? Reported to the Department of Redundancy Department.

I was helping a colleague install an ATM and there was no hole for the mains cable to go through so we requisitioned one from stores The stores clerk phoned the order in before he realised what he was ordering. Stores staff know a lot of rude words and don't have a sense of humour.

Well, I guess that you underspecified the hole. Inbound or outbound? D'ye want a grommet with that?

Pretty sure the last time I assembled some flat pack stuff the packs of screws had one extra in them.

"Just in case" I guess.

I imagine they figured out it shows goodwill, better and cheaper to supply a spare than have customers calling support with a sheepish "dropped it on the floor", having to explain why it is so costly to ship a single screw, and the hassle of handling the admin of that transaction.

It is a godsend when you do drop one and have no idea where it catapulted itself to. And an appreciated addition to the 'spare screw' box otherwise.

Some time ago I started to assemble two Ikea desks for my grandchildren. Both of them had the same component severely mangled. It appeared that one set of holes had been drilled and then the component turned round before drilling the second lot so that it could be fitted with either set of holes correctly placed but not both. You got away lightly with one missing hole.

That was definitely much later than the nineties.

It is difficult to think of a move more likely to antagonise their customers than forcing a 15 minute wait for 'help'.

The answer to that challenge is of course: letting their long suffering customers† know this.

† one would like to think ex-customers but there are a surprisingly large number of masochists.

> The returns department in Ikea is a soul destroying place. The staff do not make eye contact with the angry customers, just refund your money without question, poor chaps.

Funny story. I once bought a flatpack shelf at Ikea. While assembling it, part of the wood just outright crumbled to bits while I was driving a screw into it. This was a fairly large shelf, and the problem occurred after I had already fixed the larger bits.

I drove back to the store and went to customer service. The CS guy initially blamed me for incorrect assembly when I described the problem. But I had actually brought the entire shelf with me, thanks to a friend loaning me his van. I brought it to the CS desk, and from there to the store's workshop. The CS guy timidly tried to tell to the workshop guys that they couldn't replace it for free because it was an assembly mistake.

The workshop guy replied, right in front of me and my friend: "Don't be ridiculous. Replace it. We all know the quality we sell here."

They couldn't give me just the part, so they took back the shelf and gave me a whole new one. I left with a significantly better opinion of the store (though not of that specific CS guy). I mean, come on, it's a shelf that costs ten to twenty times less than what I would buy at a traditional furniture store. I know perfectly well what I'm buying, you know perfectly well what you're selling, and I've already agreed to it. You really don't need to lie to me.

A week later, I was back in the store to get a few more things, and they had my shelf, the original one, fully assembled with a somewhat unsightly mess of screws holding up the crumbly bit, for sale at one quarter of the price.

Not sure why so many complain about IKEA.

Just get the Family card and your sorted. Best customer service I've come across (I once broke a cupboard because I was an idiot and tried to skip a step).

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/customer-service/knowledge/articles/df104e78-fcdf-4570-b637-bdbbg5883cbe.html

I suppose now things can be ordered online things are different but the physical stores are so bad that I consider them an elaborate experiment in customer abuse. (HP and Microsoft are latecomers by comparison). Getting in and out of the car park at the Leeds store was bad enough. The inadequate number of loading bays was just more of the same. There was also a notice that trolleys were not to be taken up to the top car park floor. Without that notice I would have taken my trolley up and returned it so I did the only reasonable thing in response: I took the trolley up there and left it.

I will not buy from Ikea again.

"We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience".

Should actually be " We're a really shitty company that doesn't give a fuck about our customers and all we want is their money".

Yes, but that's been the case for years now. Everybody here knows it, and nobody in the know buys HP junk.

But that doesn't matter to HP as their target buyers are in small part clueless retail consumers, and mainly enterprise procurement departments who have to buy either the cheapest upfront regardless of how they'll get reamed through corporate changes, or have to buy whatever the relevant director tells them to after a slap up lunch and a round of golf with HP's sales team.

Well done there for getting HP to do the right thing. Any chance of doing something similar for HMRC. A reduction from 1 hour delay to 15 minutes would be amazing.

It does feel like reality imitates satire sometimes. I'm also still not buying a new HP product - ever.

I knew they were going downhill when I had to put new batteries in my HP-11 after _only twenty-seven years_!

"I'm also still not buying a new HP product - ever."

I don't need to, nor do I need to ring them. My HP printer is one of the old school - uses 3rd party toner without complaint and just runs.

If they thought this would remain confidential and in house they picked the wrong places to pilot it in.

Ridiculous decision and everyone knows it's about cost saving. But will the PHB get the blame for this? Of course not

PHB will not pay in monetary terms, but I've seen 3rd level managers in HP (probably about 100 heads under them) being moved to a PM role for "highly strategic projects" with total headcount of 2.

Not sure if the genius who pulled out this idea out of his ass will get the same treatment (and we know the next PHB's idea will be just as bad) but it warms my heart a little knowing that, AFAIK, some get a kick in the butt, at least politically

Mythbusters have actually made a lead ballon [1]and it flew.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZSkM-QEeUg

Not inflated with xenon, then?

How dumb do you have to be not to have predicted what sort of "feedback" you'd get when you discussed this shitty idea in the first place?