The Maytag customer service experience

We have a Maytag fridge and very nice it is too. However, sometimes it seems to be too cold and things freeze up. After far too long procrastinating and just excepting that cold was how fridges were supposed to be I called Maytag for support…

I hadn’t bothered to register the fridge when I bought it. We were busy with doing up the flat and sending in the registration card seemed low on the list of priorities. Even so the customer service rep knew who I was from my post code and talked me through finding the serial number on the fridge so that she could provide more accurate information.

Once that was out of the way she told me that the fridge, an M2260iSSB, had a five year warrantee and that we were still well within that period. Notes on her system said that we would need an engineer to visit to fix the fridge as there was a known issue that could cause the ‘crisper drawer is too cold and all our salad freezes’ issue. She said that an engineer would call me back to arrange a date and time.

The engineer called, arranged a date, called the night before to confirm the time (a 3hr window) and arrived on time. He took one look at the fridge and smiled as he pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. “I was expecting it to be this”, he said…

5 minutes later the ‘meat and cheese’ drawer had been removed and a small piece of polystyrene with a hole in it had been fitted to the side of it. The hole lined up with a hole in the side of the fridge and the polystyrene block formed a seal between the hole and the ‘meat and cheese’ drawer. The block channels cold air from the freezer into the compartment; without it the air simply fell into the entire fridge and the bottom of the fridge (and the salad drawers) tended to get too cold. The engineer explained how he must have replaced 1000s of these pieces; they look like packing material and people often throw them out during installation. The problem is flagged on their system and later models have a better solution (the block is screwed to the frame and there’s a sticker on it telling people not to remove it).

So, assuming it works (and it looks like it should) everything is good. Our salad wont freeze over the Christmas period which will remove one item from the ’things to be stressed about when you’re doing Christmas for 8 people’ list.

All in all the whole service experience was surprisingly pleasant; almost perfect in fact. The only way that it could be made better would be if the engineer could visit during the evening…