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Comment by Jamie9912 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely loathe those condescending corporate fluff responses "Welcome! I understand you're having issue with x, try doing y and z, all the best!"

So much bullshit in one paragraph, why aren't they trained to type like human beings?

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This is an example of a coherent and fairly complete issue description. It may seem like fluff in this case to rephrase the original request, but it makes sense as a blanket policy. It allows the support person to repeat the request with the official terminology and give the customer a chance to say "no, that's not what I meant" before you get 10 emails deep.

Consider that a lot of the support requests come as stream of consciousness posts with typos and no punctuation, written quickly and in anger. This issue could've been "new laptip does not take password. Its correct many times, want my many back" (I'm not joking, I've seen worse) - rephrasing and asking for the missing details can be super helpful there.

See a random selection from the first page of posts for why you'd want to verify you understood the customer: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q... , https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q... , https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q...

Applying this practice everywhere instead of "where needed" reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

My personnal pet peeve is the one where every thread on Microsoft support forum gets answered by a long response telling the person to do a scandisk.

> So much bullshit in one paragraph, why aren't they trained to type like human beings?

I'm pretty sure this is because most of the message is copy pasted and they just have a line here and there where they need to reword the users' issue to pretend its personnal.

Hi, I'm Kudrapali, an Independent Advisor and Microsoft Expert with 999 years of experience and knowledge about 'your problem'. Have you tried the obvious solution, which you already mentioned didn't work? If you did, and it still doesn't work, have you tried reinstalling the system or buying a new computer?

Do let me know if you require any further help on this. Will be glad to help you.

Thank you for your response. It seems like restarting your computer has not yet fixed your issue. I have escalated this to the correct department.

...

Hi, I'm Septapali, an Independent Advisor with 1007 years of experience. It seems you are having trouble restarting your computer […]

Some customers get rude if you don't talk to them a certain way.

While I'm not particularly impressed with the response either, especially repeating what the customer said back to them like that somehow makes the customer believe you actually understood the problem, the rest is kind of mandatory to set a professional tone so that emotions don't get involved so quickly.

Why? Because corporate boilerplate is quite a lot quicker and requires infinitely less thinking.

Their OKR at that level is probably time to issue resolution. They are a cost center and this is fastest way to close and get to the next ticket with a macro button.

If their OKR was instead product improvement to delight all future customers, say, then the response would have been "oh shit that sounds like an OS issue, let me get some engineers on this."

Repeating what was said is called a backbrief and it's useful to make sure the communication is understood sometimes. It's used as a rule in some very sensitive areas, like military command.

Perhaps some manager at HP "addressed" their customer support misunderstanding users by instituting a rule like this.

Especially at HP. In recent decades it's gone from one of the most respected companies on the planet to bottom of the dog pile.

Never ever again would I buy HP equipment.

The HP brand should have stayed with their test and measurement division (now Keysight), rather than being diluted by slapping it on crappy printers and PCs.

Exactly. And from recent news HP has just 'bobbytrapped' those crappy printers in that third-party inks will no longer work.

Resorting to such low tactics is a sign of desperation.

Edit: I still have a HP LJ-III and it still works. My-my, how HP has gone downhill since then.

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