HP Retraining Support Agents to Offer Better Windows 10 Advice

Expect a more enthusiastic response next time you call HP tech support asking about Windows 10. In response to LAPTOP's most recent Tech Support Showdown, in which we reported that Dell and HP reps were advising customers not to upgrade to Windows 10, the PC-maker said it will retrain its support agents in how to handle Microsoft's new OS.
Each year at LAPTOP, we do a series of undercover support calls (and web chats, social messages, etc) to all the major PC vendors and publish our findings, along with a grade for each company. During our testing for this year's Tech Support Showdown, we noticed a disturbing trend: technicians from both Dell and HP told us to uninstall Windows 10 on laptops that were otherwise working just fine. In the case of HP, we called to ask about enabling the company's CoolSense temperature control utility—an app that's nice to have but not mission critical—on an HP Pavilion x360 (2015 edition) we had upgraded from Windows 8.1. When our support rep couldn't find an answer to our problem, she instructed us to roll back to Windows 8.1 and remarked that "I really don't recommend [that] consumers upgrade to Windows 10."
After our initial report ran in November, HP VP of Customer Experience and Portfolio Strategy Mike Nash launched an internal investigation. We cooperated with this effort by sending in the Pavilion x360 laptop we'd used for testing and speaking in-depth with the team at HP about our experience. This week, Nash issued the following statement, detailing HP's intent to learn from the problems we uncovered.

“Delivering the best experience for our customers is the top priority for HP and that experience includes support. We have worked closely with Microsoft on Windows 10 since the beginning of their planning process; since we didn’t know exactly when the operating system would ship, all of our 2015 products were designed with Windows 10 in mind. Our two- and three-year-old HP PCs were also tested to upgrade to Windows 10.

The PC that was the subject of the support call placed by LAPTOP was one of our 2015 models and is absolutely one that was designed to run Windows 10. We appreciate LAPTOP bringing this to our attention and are using this as a valuable training opportunity with our more than 7,000 support agents to ensure customers receive a consistent, positive experience when contacting HP Support about Windows 10. At the end of the day, the customer gets to decide when and if to upgrade to Windows 10, and HP and Microsoft are ready to help make sure they are successful. We are strongly committed to Windows 10. We believe that the customer will have the best experience on Window 10, especially on HP PCs that were designed for Windows 10. Improving the customer experience is a journey and we appreciate any and all opportunities to help us navigate better on behalf of our customers.” 

While we hope that customers who call HP with Windows 10 issues get a more helpful response than we did, we recommend that consumers always look first for solutions online, no matter what brand of laptop they own. In our experience testing tech support at all the major vendors for more than five years, the answer to most tech problems is easier and faster to find online, either by visiting the manufacturer's site or combing through third-party web tutorials like our Windows 10 guide