HP had support agents available. Ready to take calls. Sitting idle.
And they made customers wait 15 minutes anyway.
In five European countries, HP implemented a deliberate wait time. Not because of high call volume. Because they wanted to “influence customers to increase digital self-solve adoption”. Their words, not mine.
The automated recording said: “We are experiencing longer wait times”. That was a lie. The wait time was by design.
How this works
The logic is pure corporate: if you make the phone experience bad enough, customers will give up and use the chatbot instead. The chatbot is cheaper to run. Fewer humans on payroll. Better margins. Quarterly numbers go up.
The customer who is calling because the chatbot could not solve their problem? Irrelevant. The customer whose printer is broken and who has already spent 30 minutes trying to fix it online? Not the priority. The priority is the metric: reduce call volume.
So you make the call experience deliberately painful. Not accidentally. Deliberately.
They reversed it in one day
Press coverage hit. HP reversed the policy within 24 hours.
Which tells you everything. They knew it was indefensible. They implemented it anyway. And they only stopped when someone noticed.
The question is not whether HP will try this again. The question is how many other companies are doing the same thing right now, without anyone noticing.
The pattern
This is not unique to HP. It is a pattern across the entire tech industry: design against your users to optimize for your metrics.
Subscription cancellation flows that take seven clicks. Cookie consent banners designed to make “accept all” the easiest option. Free trials that require a credit card and then auto-renew with zero warning.
Every one of these is a deliberate decision by someone who looked at user behavior and asked: “How do we make them do what we want?” instead of “How do we help them do what they need?”
HP just got caught being more brazen about it than most.
What I keep coming back to
There is a person at HP who designed this system. Who wrote the requirements document. Who specified “15 minutes” as the wait time. Who approved the fake recording about “longer than expected wait times”.
That person went home and probably used their own products. And when their printer broke and they needed support, I wonder if they called the number.
Source: Ars Technica