Sears bad customer service experience  - Providing good customer service is all about meeting customer expectations. You don’t have to provide the best service if your customers don’t expect it. However, once you have established an expectation of service in your customer’s mind, you better not violate it. For example, we generally expect poor customer service from businesses like cable providers, airlines, and cell phone companies. I don’t expect GREAT service from a big retailer like Sears, but I do have a higher level of expectation than I would for the aforementioned businesses. That being said, they failed to meet my expectations in this case.

As I mentioned before, in this month of emergencies, I am also dealing with a broken oven. I contacted Sears yesterday to set up a service appointment. The call went fairly well, the customer service rep was friendly and they scheduled something for Saturday- I had to have that because I’m just too busy at work right now to stay home on a weekday. Taking care of that was quick and I was hopeful that I would get my oven fixed before Wednesday, when I will need it to cook food for a small Halloween party at my house.

Today, I received a call from some local appliance repair company (I had no idea I would get a call from anyone) and they actually had my wife’s name somehow- I’m assuming Sears must have had her name in their computer attached to our phone number. Rather strange, but I went ahead and returned the call. Upon speaking to this company they looked up my record and said they could schedule something for Monday. I was a bit surprised and figured I just didn’t hear that right. I said I had set up an appointment with Sears for Saturday between 8 and 12. The person I was speaking to seemed surprised and said that Sears shouldn’t be scheduling their appointments because Sears doesn’t know their schedule. What? The whole point of the Sears service is to call them and set up an appointment. I gave up on these local people since they came off as being rather disorganized,  but I’m really surprised that Sears would do such a bad job of providing a service. If you are going to just set up a call center and outsource everything, you should really spend some time choosing quality people to represent you. As it stands now, I would never try to use Sears again for any services and now I’m going to have to go through the process of finding a local service provider. Not sure how to find a good one, so I guess I’ll just cross my fingers.