Twitter and General Electric Customer Service
I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with a recent experience with GE customer service. It’s not often that I go out of my way to talk about a customer service experience, especially when it’s good. If you know me, you know that you usually only hear the gripes. Well, let me tell you why I feel compelled to share this experience with you.
About a week ago, my 7 year old GE fridge unexpectedly stopped working. I had tried everything I could think of to get it working, but when I realized the issue was not something I could fix, I had no choice but to schedule a service call. I was able to schedule the service call online, through GE’s website. It even let me pick the service day and time. It was quick and easy, and actually worked as expected.
The GE service technician arrived on time, as scheduled. After running some tests, he determined that I needed a new control board (basically the brains of the fridge). It ended up being a $353 repair - $110 for the part, $60 for a set of new water filters, $160 for the service call, plus tax.
What upset me was that it was the 3rd major GE appliance I’ve had repaired in the last 7 year. Given that my house is only 7 years old, and all of my major appliances were purchased brand new with the house, and are all GE, I was pissed. Not knowing who to even gripe to about the disappointment in quality, and all the expenses I’ve incurred, I turned to Twitter to see if GE had a customer service twitter account.
The only GE twitter account I was able to find was for Megan Parker, who runs a blog for GE called GE Reports. Well, I decided to send Megan the following tweet…
I was just venting, and did not expect anything to come of it. Well, to my surprise, I received a reply from Megan asking me to send her my contact info so that she could pass it to the right person within GE.
I did just that, and this morning I received this email from a GE representative.
I quickly responded to the email with all of the pertinent information. To my surprise, the rep told me that they were going to send me a refund for half of the service call. While it does not address the quality issues with my GE appliances, it does tell me that GE does care about their customers. For this to happen so quickly, because of a 140 character twitter post that I fired off, speaks volumes to the power of social networking, and to the value GE places on their customers.
11/11/09 - Read the latest update on my GE customer service experience.
