Give this guy a wrench

The Maytag television ads running earlier this year show its latest repairman stuffing a frozen pizza and cake into a steam dishwasher to demonstrate the product’s toughness. He’s also shown fixing a copier, a teddy-bear assembly line, and even a homeowner’s cable-TV connection. The message is reliability: He’s got time on his hands, not having to repair Maytag appliances. “Tell me about it,” he quips in almost every spot.

As with the original character who sat by a phone that never rang, you won’t see actor Clay Jackson (pictured) actually helping anyone with a Maytag appliance. But a survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center rated the century-old brand, which has been acquired by Whirpool, below average at solving problems and helping over the phone and through its Web site. (Frigidaire and Jenn-Air also scored lower than most.) Maytag got especially bad marks for in-home service.

Carolyn Millard of Ames, Iowa, was one dissatisfied Maytag customer. In our survey, she complained that her Maytag dishwasher needed repeated repairs to the same part. Once the dishwasher’s service warranty ran out, she says, the company would have charged her for further labor even though the part was still covered.

While many Maytag cooking appliances have been reliable, its front-loading washers and top-freezer refrigerators have been found to be relatively repair-prone for some time, according to our Annual Product Reliability Survey. Moreover, this year dishwashers and top-load washers joined the list. A recall of 2.3 million Maytag and Jenn-Air dishwashers last year was also attributable to Maytag manufacturing, involving models sold from 1997 to 2001.

Lynn Holmgren, national director of customer care for Whirlpool, acknowledges that before the acquisition, Maytag had issues with phone support. “Maytag had outsourced some of their contact centers, and their volumes were so high that they were inadvertently blocking calls,” she says, and she claims that Whirlpool has quickened response on its brands partly through more training. Whirlpool had average marks for support.