LG Refrigerators

Got to speak to almost 7 to 8 LG reps, spent almost 15-20 hrs on phone, every time diff. answers, even after 1 month 1 week, the problem never solved. They scheduled one more service call to same Goodman service company again for an urgent service request almost 4 days ago, but no response from them yet. Can you imagine how can one survive without a Ref during this Covid situations, in hot summer in Texas for more than a month with two small kids. Spent almost $2k, still in Warranty, bought extended Warranty, which of no use when needed. It has been terrible. Hope LG may take an appropriate action to resolve my problem ASAP...

My tenants tried repeatedly to call LG, as did my husband, but got the same message. After calling all over town our tenants were able to reach a repair facility, who informed them that the compressor had likely failed, since this is a common issue with LG fridges. Unfortunately, the repair facility wouldn't come out to help (we had all the necessary documents, including an extended warranty) because they weren't sure if they were considered an "essential" business. They took my tenants' contact info and said they'd let them know once they had a better idea of whether they were.. Meanwhile, my tenants, who have small children in the house, had no way to keep fresh food and milk for their family and ended up having to obtain a rental refrigerator to feed their family. Finally, after ordering the compressor and being allowed to go out to install it, the part was replaced on 4/2/2020.

My husband continued to try and contact LG about this issue and to obtain a refund for the food and rental expenses. Finally, LG had an auto-answer that asked the caller to stay on the line, but that the hold time was exceptionally long. After staying on hold for over 45 minutes several times he was either transferred to people from another country that he couldn't understand, or they couldn't understand English, or that transferred him to another department which immediately disconnected the call he'd been on for so long. This happened repeatedly and when he finally got someone who he could carry on a full conversation with and explain the issues, this person was no helpful at all and kept trying to tell him that we waited too long to request a refund!! All his calls were placed over the course of April and May, so when LG was at fault for not being available to even hear our issues, that was truly insulting.

I finally started sending messages on LG's website and kept getting inane requests for various items (like the dates of every time we tried to email/call LG and why we didn't request the refund at that time...). The "people" I corresponded with: "Christifien" in the regular Customer Service department, "Tori", "Craig" in the "Presidential Escalations" department (who responded to my separate messages to the "President") all gave me the runaround and I had to keep sending messages to follow up, since they were hoping I'd just go away... Last month I received a check in the amount of only $150.00 with no letter or apology or explanation, but this didn't even cover half of the expenses that were incurred (I'd clearly noted in multiple emails/messages that over $300.00 was lost due to this: All the food in the defective LG fridge had to be thrown away at a cost of over $200.00 and then replaced, plus the cost of the rental).

I sent another message to the "President", stating how insulting it was to receive this amount; I finally received an email from "Laiken **", "Presidential Liaison" who was very condescending about the whole thing; her entire email message is as follows: "This is Laiken with LG. I am sorry to hear about your refrigerator issues. I have pulled up the case number, and I see your unit was down for less than a month. Due to that we cannot reimburse you for more that the $150.00 food loss you already received. As for the part, the account shows the unit was repaired under warranty at no cost to you, but if you did have to pay for the part or labor please send me a receipt for the parts/labor, and we can reimburse you for that". Unbelievable; she made it sound as if I was supposed to be grateful that they installed the defective part without charging me for it or the labor to install it, even though it was, as she admitted, still under warranty!!

I sent an email back asking her if she seriously thought a rental appliance store would just give my tenants a refrigerator for free to use while they were frantically trying to get someone to come out and repair the useless refrigerator, not to mention the costs associated with having the loaner delivered and then picked up after the LG refrigerator was fixed. I asked her "Put yourself in this position - would you feel like you were treated honestly and fairly?" That email was sent to her on 8/25/2020 without any response from her, so I'm assuming that she and the "President" feel that LG is just the poster child for honesty and fairness....

All I can do at this point is advise everyone I know to NEVER purchase one of its shoddy products. Seeing from the other posts how LG obviously knows about their defective compressors, yet does nothing about it, and to top it off lacks customer service skills of any sort, I can only hope that my post here will help people decide against ever doing business with this despicable company. As others stated, even one star is too high for this company!

I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t cost them dearly in customers and loyalty. It certainly has turned my 18 and 22 year old sons off after watching what we are going through since July. That’s future business right there that they screwed up. Not to mention my failing double oven, dryer, and dishwasher which need replacing soon. And where there is one there are hundreds or thousands more. That’s a lot of exponential word of mouth.

LG is losing all that future business for what? To save a buck on repairs now by forcing customers to use their preferred 1-star rating repair servicer even if they repaired it once already and it failed? To avoid doing the right thing by reimbursing their customers for full damages and losses fully caused by their part failures as well as their repair failures? That choice alone about customer service reflects poorly on the business smarts of a company, which in turn affects reliability. If you ever have a warranty repair with your LG products, you are at risk of what is happening to us right now. Are you willing to gamble for that much money?

We bought our LG French Door refrigerator Thanksgiving 2016 for $2800. Chose LG because of reputation, longevity claims about the model, and their description of great customer service should something go wrong. We thought it was worth the expense. The linear compressor failed after 3-1/2 years in July. We had to wait 2-1/2 weeks before their “authorized repair servicer” got here to repair it. We bought a larger mini fridge and still lost well over $300 of food. Their servicer did not call us to first diagnose or ascertain what parts might be needed. They simply showed up and assumed they only needed to swap out a compressor.

LG bottlenecked their quality before they got here by only authorizing a maximum of $505 including labor, regardless that neither of them knew for sure what all needed to be checked and repaired. They set us up for failure. Their preferred provider didn’t even look for leaks in hoses that might have caused the compressor to fail to begin with, so if there was one it’s still there! They did not replace all the other covered parts that are supposed to be replaced with this repair, such as evaporators, hoses, etc. Two weeks after the repair we spent $450 on groceries believing it was safe to now restock. Two days later it broke again.

My dealings with customer service since have been unacceptable. I have been patient and understanding about all the extremely long hold times given Covid, (1 hour and 17 minutes on hold this morning before the exec division picked up,) but not understanding about forcing their customers to have to retell all of the specifics of their circumstances dozens of times to each new agent that picks up, treating them like a first time caller, before anyone finally understands again how egregious the case has been handled thus far. And when they finally do they have no power to ensure it won’t continue to happen. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There are too many cooks in the kitchen and all the departments that have to be involved are isolated and cut off from the other so the agents can never prevent anything from going wrong again or have influence over final decisions. There is no quality control in LG’s customer service. Their executive services group can’t directly talk to someone in the authorization department to ensure everyone is on the same page so they stop sabotaging what was agreed to. They have no true escalation capabilities and if they do they are highly ineffective. I believe this is purposeful when it comes to these refrigerators.

The first agent this time around said our case was escalated since we just went through this. That didn’t mean squat in the end. It has been dealt with worse than the first time and has followed the same channels as a first time repair. He said dispatch would be calling me directly this time 3-4 days from our call to lessen the amount of time we were without our fridge again. That was August 22 and today 2-1/2 weeks later we are still without a working fridge.

No one called. I had to start all over from the top when I called back. They tried to resend the same incompetent repair company as last month and ignored our request to send a different one that would approach it properly this time and give us confidence we wouldn’t be put through this again next month. It’s exhausting to pull everything out again, set up coolers and ice and check safety of food every day. Their preferred service provider in our area was going to be at least 2 more weeks out. LG blamed Covid saying it has impacted the availability of servicers in our area. The truth was LG directly prevented a timely and proper repair we had access to; it was not a problem with availability of servicers in our area, it was a problem of a company only wanting to use a one-star servicer that they can successfully under compensate, regardless that the repair company cuts corners and does inferior work to make it worth what LG pays.

We asked LG why we couldn’t find our own repair company nearby who could get here sooner than 2 weeks. They told us if we could find someone sooner they would gladly email them the authorization, because they can’t find anyone else. All they can see is their authorized 1-star servicer. We had a 5-star service nearby standing in my kitchen the very next day! And they had done a lot of warranty work for LG before so we were delighted with having found them.

They diagnosed the fridge thoroughly first, and in person, recognized that the compressor was not installed correctly and not all parts were properly replaced. Due to this we had oil leaking all over the place creating new repair problems. We called LG back and provided all the contact info they requested. They called our chosen repair co. that same day too and told both of us they would submit a request for authorization and they should have it in the next 24-48 hours. Our repair would be done in under three days. Instead, we got a text and email the next day that their 1-star servicer has accepted our repair request and would be there 12 days later.

We called immediately and complained we had someone sooner and did not want the same company, and our case was escalated again. The executive group agent said she saw what happened, the wrong department got the request and ignored the notes in our account and on the request. She canceled their servicer and personally emailed the department directly with the info for the repair company we found, highlighting they were available immediately to do the repair and they have done warranty work for them before.

Two days later we get another text/email that the 1-star company happily accepted our request again. I called LG again and the new exec agent listened to all that had happened prior and understood my rage, and told me they were having problems with the authorization department and she had no power to ensure it wouldn’t keep happening this way, but she did have the power to submit a request for a full refund. She had me upload a receipt and confirmed it was received and valid. She would send the request for an auth to our chosen servicer one more time and would call me two days later to see if they had received the authorization. If not she would go through with the refund request.

Instead, I get several texts from LG’s chosen servicer all weekend long reminding us they were coming. However, in the past two weeks that servicer did not once call us to get information to determine what parts might be needed, which confirmed for us that if we let them into our home it was going to be handled sloppily like the first time they did the repair. We are sick of what we’ve had to go through living out of a mini fridge for almost two months. For a family of five with adult kids? We want to feel confident it’s done right this time.

What LG did that was unethical was agree that if we could find someone sooner they would send an authorization, and then they repeatedly hosed that authorization and every subsequent request for one over the next two weeks to buy time until the A&E appointment was just around the corner. They ignored our valid concerns and discomfort of having this company do the repair again. It’s not like we chose a servicer that never did LG warranty work before. There is no excuse for putting us through this hell.

Call several appliance repair companies in your area before you commit to buying anything. They know what brands and products are easiest to fix and have the least hassles with warranty repairs, and which are reliable. All the other repair companies we initially called said the same thing: “we no longer do LG repairs” and if you ask why they all tell you the same thing, “it’s because LG under-compensates true costs and undermines their efforts to do quality work. And it’s too much of a headache to deal with their customer service. It’s just not worth it given the amount of time we would have to put into dealing with them.”

I wish I would have called them before choosing an LG fridge, because I never would have purchased it. But this is the real reason LG has a hard time finding an available service provider in your area. And when you find your own? They sabotage it. All to save a buck? How is two or three under compensated repairs in a row cheaper than one done right the first time at a fair price for the actual time required to do a proper job? It can only serve to hurt your customer for unnecessary and unreasonable lengths of time and kills all future business, and word of mouth compounds that.

I was also told today there is no guarantee the refund will be approved. They look at how many times it’s been repaired in deciding too! The fact that they were interfering with the repairs, and they failed to let us have a timely and proper one that we had standing right there two weeks ago is not taken into account. If they deny our refund, they will simply reschedule their shoddy servicer all over again. At this point the right thing to do is approve a full refund.

My husband is paid hourly and his company is about to be impacted by Covid so he will lose hours pay in the near future. We have to use our scant emergency fund to pay for a reliable refrigerator repair, about $1200-$1400 after the botched repair, or buy a new one. And not having that emergency money is going to hurt us when my husband’s hours are reduced. We cannot tolerate more weeks Iiving like this and never should have had to when we had a reliable repair company standing in our kitchen two weeks ago!

To add insult to injury, LG has taken forever to approve our food loss and mini fridge reimbursement requests from July. Several reps quoted from our account that they saw the mini fridge reimbursement was officially approved on August 12 but there was no notes about the food loss. We were told this for the following two weeks every time we called. Then today, the rep said the notes showed it wasn’t approved until September. Somebody changed the notes. We were also told that we couldn’t have both a food loss reimbursement and a mini fridge reimbursement. They only allow one $250 reimbursement per calendar year, regardless if they caused you way more losses.

We lost well over $500 of food so far plus paid $260+ for a mini fridge. We can’t even claim food loss this time around even though their repair failed and we properly waited a couple weeks after the repair to make sure it was good before shopping again. Customers can be out $750-$1,000 due to LG’s own mistakes, and only get reimbursed for $250 of it all while they go through hell with customer service. LG does not care about you as a customer or any impact they have had on you or the domino effect. Now, is all this worth buying their $2800 refrigerator? Absolutely not.

The fix process went surprisingly well. I had predicted a disaster. Door came off easily as did the old hinge. I draped a towel in front while the power was off to retain the cool. In the old days we used to put the old fridge out in the garage after the remodel where it cooled beer for 20 more years. Those days are gone. I have a LG washer dryer combo that was very high end at the time of purchase. They have performed perfectly for ten years now. My LG dishwasher went bad two months after the warranty ran out. I took it apart, took one look and put it back together. Whatever I did it must have reset the circuit board or something. Works fine now.

* Tech showed up today. Michael who works for LG direct service. He not only had a compressor on him to replace the default one but had all the tools to get it done today. He was very professional and and explained to me contrary to other reviews on here that LG has upgraded and improved their software and the compressors so hopefully this will not happen again. Only took him about 90min to get it all fixed as he knew his stuff! * Fridge is fixed and running only two days after I first called customer service on a weekend at no cost on labor or parts.

I don't write many reviews on anything but feel that this was deserving as I'm sure others had valid unpleasant experiences, but mine was a very positive one. If anyone else has this issues don't hit the panic button based on other's reviews. I don't know if it helped the cause but I was very calm and understanding when I called them to explain the problem as well. Products are going to have issues but I will judge a company based on how they deal with those problems and LG handled this very professional and I am very satisfied. Hopefully this repair holds up but if not if they deal with it the same way this one went they will retain me as a customer on future purchases. I do really like the fridge as well so 5 stars both for the fridge as well as the service.