It's not clear from the article. Are they reducing the staff count so that it naturally averages at at least 15 minutes to get to an agent or are they literally adding a loop in to make people wait even if an agent is available? While longer waits are not great, I guess I could excuse the first way. If they are just sticking people on hold to make they hang up even when the wait time would have been shorter without an artificial hold, that is just bad.
It's the latter, but is there any effective difference, really? Say that lowering their their staff level from X to Y would result in a 15 minute wait for a smaller, undeterred group of callers. Putting an artificial floor for wait time of 15 minutes would mean that (X-Y) agents are sitting idle while callers are artificially waiting. I assume HP would not continue to employee them, since cost reduction was the point, after all. So it seems like the only difference is order of operations.
> To reaffirm the changes, HP says in the staff memo: "The wait time for each customer is set to 15 minutes - notice the expected wait time is mentioned only in the beginning of the call."
