Does Making Customers Wait Help Them Feel Successful?

By intentionally increasing on-hold times, HP broke one of the most important maxims of engineering for human behavior:

Help the customer feel successful.

When a company fails at this, customers notice. If your actions make people feel blocked, delayed, or dismissed, they won’t assume good intent. They’ll assume you don’t value them.

Many of the most successful CEOs have insisted on a simple starting point: “We love our customers.” That belief shows up in every decision.

Now consider what recently came to light: in some regions, HP deliberately held callers in support queues for at least 15 minutes to push them toward online self-service.

That’s not behavioral engineering. That’s friction. It doesn’t make customers feel successful. It makes them feel trapped.

And the messaging doesn’t help either: directing frustrated callers to long URLs and complex instructions while they’re already stuck on hold only adds cognitive load at the worst possible moment.

More recently, HP’s support flow has shifted to prioritize online options, requiring a serial number before even allowing a call.

Again, the same question applies:

Does this help the customer feel successful - or does it make them work harder to get help?

If the goal is to guide behavior from phone to digital, there are far better ways to do it.

The science of human behaviour offers clear, proven approaches:

• Reduce friction - offer to text the caller the web address so they don’t have to copy down a URL, but can simply click exactly where you’re directing them.
• Make the preferred path feel easier, not forced - some people would prefer to talk to a human. Maybe they’ve already tried using your website and couldn’t find what they needed.
• Reinforce progress, not punishment - Some callers might like to hear what number in the queue they are in, and hear the updates when they move up in line. Or, maybe offer to call them back so they aren’t waiting on hold.
• Design for clarity in moments of stress - Their time is precious, too. Finding the friction spots in the on-hold calls can help you make adjustments.

This is where most organizations struggle: not in intent, but in execution.

CUBE helps close that gap.

Through behavioral science and software-defined telephony, we help organizations design systems that guide customer choices naturally - without frustration, without coercion, and without sacrificing experience.

Book your exploratory call with us to discuss design ideas and systems for your customers: https://choicecatalyst.com/explore/

Because when customers feel successful, they come back.