HP forced callers to wait 15 minutes before connecting to support staff

The policy was apparently meant to drive callers away from human support staff and onto online guides.

- MICHAEL CRIDER

Ever feel like tech support systems are designed to frustrate you, perhaps in the hope that you'll just give up and stop trying? For HP, that was literally the case. It’s been confirmed that the company had a mandatory 15-minute wait period for all support calls in the UK and other countries. The policy has since allegedly been removed.

The Register reports (fave.co/4imNx5q) that it saw an internal policy document for HP's support team in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy, which said that everyone who called in for tech support for PCs and printers would have a minimum wait time of 15 minutes before getting through to a human operator. The idea was to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-serve,” essentially forcing people to interact with the loathed “press 1 for yada yada” system.