I don’t have enough clout to get it repaired. I don’t have a million Twitter followers and a blog with a huge following, so if I have a problem with it and complain, the “manager of the executive office” from Maytag’s parent company isn’t going to call and make it all better for me. I’m not going to get offered a new appliance because of the hoopla I created. I’d be stuck waiting for the repairman just like everyone else.
Maytag’s attempt to fix the problem didn’t really help their bigger problem of rebranding. Now they’re the company that allows a washing machine to go unrepaired for almost a month instead of the company that makes dependable washing machines, I now have a new narrative associated with them.
Now, I know what happened to a sleep-deprived mom of an infant who needed her brand new $1300 washing machine repaired and how the repairman came to her house three times over a 23 day span and the washer still didn’t work. I know now that a sleep-deprived mom who needed her brand new Maytag washing machine was told that she would have to wait 3-5 days for a repairman to fix the machine that wasn’t repaired by the last repairman even though she had been waiting close to a month. And she was also told that company policy dictated that they couldn’t replace it until there were three attempts at a fix and even though the repairman was there three times, he was only on his first attempt. Yes, 23 days, 3 visits and 1 attempted repair. And they wanted her to repeat this cycle two more times? (Without giving her a loaner!)
What about the commercial where the repairman is bored and has nothing to do because the machines are so dependable? Evidently, that’s a crock since you can’t get a repairman right away, it takes them three to five days to schedule work on a brand new $1300 washing machine. Must be some kind of backlog, huh?
That narrative will stick with me when I go to the store to purchase a new washing machine. They should have listened to the very famous blogger when she said she had a million followers on Twitter, now the story’s out and I could care less that they fixed her machine since I know it’s only because it made a big enough noise.
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