After WCVB in Boston did an investigation into Sears’ awful, awful customer service record when it comes to installation and repair of appliances (a category in which they used to excel), Sears has now apologized to its Boston customers.

We see absolutely no evidence that Sears’ horrific customer service is in any way limited to the Boston area. In fact, we don’t see any evidence that the problem is limited to this country. The most recent complaint we published was from Canada.

Sears’ CEO should apologize to all of their customers in North America, not just the ones who are embarrassing them on television. Here’s Sears’ statement (emphasis ours):

“Through a combination of the efforts of our associates, along with the additional capacity we’ve added in the Boston market, Sears is starting to see improved response times for our warranty and service contract customers and we continue to aggressively work through our backlog of open orders.

We want our customers to know that we take their satisfaction very seriously and will continue to focus on improving service levels in that area.

In addition, beginning this week, any customer after Sept. 1 who had a cycle time (from first call to completed service) longer than 14 days will receive a letter from our CEO, along with an extension of the term of their product warranty or service contract.”

As a reminder, here are the steps we’ve been taking to improve our service levels:

# The current workforce is scheduled for 6 day weeks.
# We have temporarily reassigned technicians from southern New Hampshire, Boston’s North and South Shore areas and from Rochester, NY to the western suburban Boston areas to increase capacity.
# We will be using authorized outside contractors where available and appropriate.
# We are prescreening scheduled service calls for parts that need to be ordered & shipped to avoid unnecessary trips and to decrease cycle times.
# We’ve hired additional service techs over the past six weeks who have started running service calls this month, and intend to continue to recruit additional techs into that market until our service response time returns to an acceptable level.
“

Chris Brathwaite | DVP – Corp. Public Relations Sears Holdings

If you would like an apology from Sears, please tell us why at tips@consumerist.com. Put “Sears Apology” in the subject.

Sears CEO Apologizes To Boston-Area Customers [WCVB] (Thanks, John!)
(Photo:OctopusHat)

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