Sears Responds

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

After my post the other day about trying to order a Kenmore water filter from Sears ... and after sending a note to the only two e-mail addresses for Sears contacts I could find, for a pair of Chicago-based PR people ... along with various reporters and well-known retail analysts ... and after sending hard-copies of my column to various executives at Sears Holdings Corporation ...

... I got a reply yesterday, in the form of an e-mail, from a woman named Stephanie at something called “National Customer Relations Executive Support.” The e-mail asked me to contact her so that she could “assist [me] in getting this resolved if possible.” There was a toll-free number.

Call I did yesterday afternoon; I left a message, and got a call back a couple hours later. Stephanie said she had read both my e-mail and the web post, and found the situation disturbing. She acknowledged that there was clearly some work to be done in terms of customer support and systems development for the Sears.com site. More importantly, she said she had contacted the manager of a local Sears, who was able to tell her the corresponding water filter cartridge part number – and he told her he would send me two free cartridges if I bought the filter unit. (I had, all this tsuris notwithstanding.) Stephanie took my address and said the replacement filters would be shipped to me.

I want to resist the temptation to draw a big-picture “moral” out of this story. I wrote my original piece because I was frustrated, annoyed – and flummoxed – by the systems Sears has in place. On the one hand, I think it’s great that Sears has a “National Customer Relations Executive Support” team to help deal with these issues. On the other hand it raises some questions both about normal levels of service, and about how the average customer would ever be able to take advantage of “Executive Support.”

In making a rather public stand, and putting time and energy into contacting various people, I was able to get more attention. But one clearly should not have to do that. I hope this is a further prod to Sears to make the changes to their systems and infrastructure that Stephanie herself acknowledged as being important.

I'll let you know how the water filter is, once we get it installed.