Refrigerator Repair
This narrative details our experience with Mr. Appliance during our attempt to repair our 2016 LG-manufactured Kenmore Elite refrigerator, which had lost its ability to maintain sufficient cooling. To begin, without exception their employees, be they the technician who came to our home to troubleshoot and repair our refrigerator or those with whom I spoke on the phone (I shall refer to them as their office staff) were unfailing polite and congenial. What's more, on the two occasions their technician visited our home he made a point of donning disposable fabric shoe guards before he entered the house, a simple gesture we genuinely appreciated. However, this is the extent to which our satisfaction with Mr. Appliance ends, and here's why. The communication between their office staff and their customers is extraordinarily poor to the point of being non-existent. While their technician showed up promptly on the morning of Wednesday, July 24 for our first scheduled appointment, our next three service calls were all no-shows. The technician originally diagnosed that the faulty component in our refrigerator was a failed thermostat, and using his iPad, scheduled a return visit five days later, on Monday, July 30 between the hours of 8:00 AM and noon. No one more than I (as a retired airline captain) understands that replacement parts are not always on hand, and that it can prohibitively expensive to maintain a ready supply of replacement components in stock, but having said that, if the part is unavailable at the time of the scheduled repair the customer should be told this ahead of time. We arranged our schedule to expect their technician to arrive by noon on July 30, and when I called their office after 2:00 PM I was told that Mr. Appliance's customary daily UPS delivery had not yet been made, thus the new thermostat had not arrived and, as a result, our service appointment had been rescheduled to the following day, on Tuesday, July 31. The technician returned the following morning and his subsequent inspection of our refrigerator revealed that a portion of its compressor had failed as well, and upon giving us an estimate of what it would cost to remove and replace the compressor, we agreed to have this repair done. Showing us the available (open) service call dates on his iPad, he promised to return three days later, on Friday morning, August 3, between the hours of 8:00 AM and noon. Once again, he never showed up that morning, and when I called Mr. Appliance later that day to inquire about his whereabouts, I was told that we had been rescheduled a week later to the afternoon of Friday, August 10, because a replacement compressor had not been found. Becoming wary by now, I called their office on Thursday, August 9 to verify that a Mr. Appliance technician was scheduled to arrive at our home the following day, on Friday, August 10 between the hours of noon and 4:00 PM. I was assured that he was. However, once again this was not the case, for at 3:07 PM the following day, Friday, August 10, I called to ask if a technician would be arriving at our home within the next 53 minutes as we had been promised the day before. The answer again was "No, we haven't located a replacement compressor yet, but we'll call you when we do to make another service call appointment." When I asked why we were, once again, never advised of this, I was told that at precisely 4:32 PM the previous afternoon (on Thursday, August 9), approximately one hour after I had called to verify our appointment, a member of their office staff called and left a message to say that our service appointment had been indefinitely delayed. We found no such voicemail message on either our home landline telephone answering machine or on my cell phone. Moreover, as each our our home's three landline telephones have Caller ID and digitally record the number of each incoming call, we found that only two telephone calls were made to our home that day, both telephone numbers we easily recognized, with the second call being made at 12:54 PM, not 4:32 PM. Thinking that the Mr. Appliance office may have incorrectly recorded our telephone numbers, I called back on Monday afternoon, August 13 at 3:30 PM to verify that information. The young lady who answered recited what she found stored in their computer records, and our contact information was absolutely correct. What's more, when I called their office on three separate occasions to learn the status of finding a replacement compressor, I was promised by each supervisor with whom I spoke that we would be called back with an update "within a day". That, too, never happened. We heard nothing. Again, I understand the difficulty in securing OEM replacement parts, particularly when LG refused to release a new compressor to Mr. Appliance simply because we had bought our refrigerator from Sears, and insisted that we would have to call one of Sears' service centers to schedule repairs. (We were told that on Tuesday, August 14 when a female representative from "LG Electronics" in Alabama telephoned to tell us this). We genuinely appreciate the efforts that the staff of Mr. Appliance went to locate and secure a replacement compressor for us, but what baffles me is the complete lack of courtesy and consideration on their part to apprise us, the customers, of any appointment cancellation well before the service technician is supposed to arrive. Having to wait for replacement parts to arrive is irksome enough, but waiting around for half a day for a technician to show up when he never intended to in the first place is downright annoying, especially when it happens three times within a twelve-day period. So, would I recommend Mr. Appliance to any other potential customers in need of an appliance repair? Absolutely not.
