HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'
theregister.com
theregister.com
You need a printer, so you go to the store.
The inkjet printer industry offers you an all-in-one printer/ scanner/ copier with 1200dpi printing for $65. It includes "3 months free instant ink".
The laser printer industry offers you a printer with 600 dpi colour printing, no scanner/copier function, and it costs $265.
You ask the nice young man in the store which is better. He tells you the inkjet gives the best quality for printing photos, and the laser printer is best for business use and people printing 500 pages per week or more.
So you buy the inkjet. Repeat 3 years later after it stops working.
my mother (80yrs old) recently bought a printer because she was printing out poems and stories she had written over the years. that made sense for her, but i think that is going to be the exception, unless you live in a suburb or outside a city/village where a print shop is far away.
When I know I'm going to cook something big and messy I like printing off the recipe first and treat it as disposable. Same goes for when I'm about to go wrench on the car or motorcycle, having all the torque specs and diagrams and what not printed and handy even with greasy grimy hands is nice.
Then in the end I'll still want some kind of scanner around for those things I get that aren't digital yet. Phone "scanning" apps just aren't as good of quality IMO.
But yeah, outside of these things if I want a high-quality print I just print online. Lots of places around me can take print jobs online and have common stuff all ready in an hour or so.
Before that, the scanner got a lot of use for storing copies of official documents.
The only time I’ve bought a new one is because I didn’t buy a feature I wanted (scanning, duplex, color). Now I have all the things and toner that lasts years.
I ended up buying a new Brother scanner/printer that can do full-duplex scanning and printing. The thing is amazing, and I'll likely have it for another 15 years. It's solid and reliable, and the toner lasts a really long time.
For the past several years I've had an HP printer, with a subscription that costs £0 unless I print more than 10 pages (at which point it'd cost £1 per 10 extra pages). They send me ink for free automatically, and I never had to worry about it. The printer was stupid cheap.
It's honestly the best printer deal I could've asked for. I'm completely OK with it. It's convenient, virtually free, and I haven't had to think about cartridges in a long, long time.
I don't know -anything- about how HP treats its customers, I'm sure there's lots of horror stories. But... I'm very happy with the current situation, and unless I needed to print more regularly, I don't think I'd ever change.
Matter of preference of course, but I'd rather the occasional errand over the subscription/troubleshooting/physical storage.
I run dnd games and my players like having printed maps and props, so I use it more than once a year, but I’ll never buy inkjet again.
My advice, If you only need to print once in a blue moon, get a refrub'ed "office grade" laser printer off eBay (or similar). I picked one up about 10 years ago with 64,000~ prints on it for about £50, and apart from having having to change out some foam pads that had disintegrated over the years, its still printing just fine. Only had to refill the toner once (I don't print a lot) and because the drum and fuser were fine I just ordered a bottle of toner refill.
EDIT: Reread your post. As you are only printing a single page every couple of years, I would adjust my advice. You might be able to ditch the printer completely, When you do need to print use a local library or similar to do the one off print. My local library charges 15p per side for black and 50p per side for colour prints.
Sure I wouldn't use them to print large amounts or even small amounts regularly, but for very very low usage paying a quid once in a blue moon to use someone elses printer and then you can leave the maintenance of the printer to someone else. But granted, you would then have to travel to a place just to print, and if you need to get the document printed ASAP, it might not be the best thing for you. But its another option to consider.
In the US you do have to pay $1.5/mo.
My current printer at home is a Canon and it's good as well.
I did the initial setup and declined to create an account, after which it successfully printed 20 pages before refusing to print anything other than a sheet of paper telling me I needed to create an HP account and finish setting it up with the app.
There was absolutely no way it would print without an HP account, and, even if I’d made one, it’d actually refuse to print if it ever didn’t have an internet connection (even over USB). Naturally it’d taken me three weeks or so to print the twenty pages and it was outside the return window, but it made me so upset that I just put it away and bought a new printer from a manufacturer that’s not overtly hostile.
HP lost me as a customer for life with that thing, and actually made me a vocal critic.
The print quality wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for a laser printer, either.
However, my experience doesn't necessarily mean that I'd by an HP printer now. So much has changed with HP over the time I've had this printer that I'm not sure how much of my experience with older products maps to current products. I'm more inclined to listen to people with more recent experience vs. my own personal experience with a company that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist anymore.
After my subscription date ends in March, they are charging me one final fee of $6.99 for the privilege of cancelling -- first time I have ever seen something like that.
I have too. And the printer insisting that I create an account in some "Smart" website and log into it even before I can print anything with it is beyond annoying.
I got around the problem by finding some old drivers that I had a backup of. But I suspect most people don't give old drivers around and are forced to go through this "Smart" sign up nonsense!
He threw a fit when I lost a political battle and a crappy policy got implemented. My response was to let him know I was approving Katie the HR lady's latest request for a desktop printer and I needed him spec out the lowest price HP inkjet for me. Dude realized if I wasn't on his team things would have been much worse. Slowly I brought him around thanks to HP printers :)
Personally, I bought the cheapest Brother laser on sale from Staples and it does all I need.
The first printer I owned was a HP DeskJet 500, but those times are long gone.
Basically we had a table with the escape codes for printers, for the common stuff (bold, italic, underline, ....), we would read the entries for the respective model, and then use them accordingly.
For what its worth, I bought an HP printer about 8 years ago and was pretty happy with it. It was reliable, fairly simple, the screen UI was genuinely well-designed, and the ink prices were fine with how rarely I printed.
And then I moved from the US to the EU and discovered that printer cartridges are regionally locked. After much research and many calls I learned HP can unlock the printer, but you need you buy completely new cartridges first. I gave away the printer and bought a Brother.
So, yeah, it was decent product clearly ruined by stupid business decisions.
The people who thought this up are clearly not aiming to provide the best-possible customer service. Likely, their goal is cost-saving, with delivery of a minimum-acceptable level of customer service.
Let's be honest, very little of HP's activity seems focussed on providing the best-possible anything.
Shareholder "value", i.e. profit
They are, like the vast majority of corporate America, only providing for themselves, and not giving one shit about anyone else, especially their marks, I mean, customers.
Although I'd propose to optimise the concept to something like "shareholder value, inasmuch as it influences the rewards of the current leadership team, within their likely period of employment".
Of course, probably what would happen is the savings would be cut from the customer support budget.
What HP did is just incompetent management. Anyone that works in CC would advice against his strongly. Handle time will go up as every call will start with a complaint about the long wait time, agents will disengage and have higher absenteeism, supervisors will be stressed & angry about it. Brand damage is priceless though. Bravo.
This policy was meant to make people give up, it's literally anti-support.
_Glances around everywhere, winces_
But seriously, how isolated and idiotic does an entire room of people need to be in order to do something like this? Did they not think the internet would go apeshit over such a policy? Was the cost-savings of people giving up on the support line worth this bad publicity? Anyone with an even slightly realistic view of being a customer would guffaw at such a suggestion. This is nothing but outright contempt for their customers.
Please help your family, friends and coworkers avoid getting burnt by the smoldering ashes of this once iconic brand.
It BARELY works for very nerdy, enthusiast-based thing. It barely works for open source packages, honestly. But "community based" support for things intended for regular people are uniformly horrible. As exhibits 1 through 1,000,000, I offer any links at all to Microsoft's tech forums.
I love The Register.
:-)
It does not continue as it should:
"Clearly we are either the dumbest people on the planet or this is an outright lie. We are not dumb. We hold profit above everything and we already have your money. You could choose to just buy another of our products and be done with it. But noooooooooo. You want us to spend some of our money helping you. As if we care. We don't care. We don't have to care, because we all treat you this way. Get used to it."
[edit to give credit: the "we don't have to care" is from the Lily Tomlin skits about Bell Telephone.]
Mais, il n'ya pas de quoi.
C'est la vie. C'est la guerre.
C'est tout.
{Thanks for getting to the root of this issue. Well done, indeed!}
"Perfection is perfected." --Snoop Dogg
There's more costs to the inbound call than just the labor...
My first crack at doing this without being shitty is maybe they could have a priority queue for people who've gone through the self help section, though you'd have to have some measures to try to detect if people just spam "no it's still not working" on every prompt and then maybe drop them into the regular queue.
1) Document several attempts to contact HP.
2) Attempt a credit card chargeback if available.
3) If it's too late, file a small claims case in your local court. Usually online. You will likely win by default.
"We're always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience."
in no universe is putting a mandatory 15min wait on a customer calling for help "improve [our] customer service experience" and if they think it actually does, that person should be summarily terminated from their position for being this stupid.
"We're always looking for ways to skirt customer service needs like the big boys at google, et. al., and to maximize our bottom line" is the real translation i guess.
Now they are just about as anti-customer as I’ve ever seen. I blame Carly fiorina for gutting company culture. I encourage everyone to stay far away from any HP product and let this zombie company finally die.
Most engineers as leaders don't ruin companies, MBAs as leaders do.
It is planet and civilization destructing mindset.
Have you noticed how MBAs have never created anything? They always take credit for unsustainable short term gains that destroy great companies and present it as a success case?
Like the MBA god Jack Welch, the reason 10% of employees in companies get terminated every year.
We don't need MBAs for the same reason we don't need to believe in horoscopes, or put a colony of termites in our house.
> Have you noticed how MBAs have never created anything?
Actually, I haven't. What I did notice, however, is that they have destroyed most everything they've touched, like, America.
MBAs are important, but they need to be kept in their place because as you say they don't create anything.
Especially if our civilization is to survive.
I remember consulting in an HP semiconductor facility in the early 2000s and being amazed that anyone could possibly run an ‘advanced’ company so poorly and get away with it.
I guess full disclaimer would be that I am currently running HPE servers and they are the best on the market.. so 500 wrongs eventually can make a right.
That is a load of absolute bullocks.
Even if we give HP the benefit of the doubt and grant that they genuinely thought the "digital options" would be better and provide quicker resolution.
If you actually care about customer service, you would alert them to the better options and give them real information to encourage them to switch, e.g., while they are on hold tell them "our live chat option typically gives you resolution times 20% quicker than telephone conversations". You do NOT just enshittify your primary option.
Sheesh
Fuck you, HP.