LG Electronics said on Mar. 4 that it will further expand its itinerant service for home appliances in rural and fishing communities this year.
The itinerant service for home appliances in rural and fishing communities is a service in which a professional service manager visits areas where customers have had difficulty visiting a service center due to distance and other reasons. It provides pre-inspections of home appliances, replacement of consumables, and education on proper product use to prevent safety accidents related to electricity, among other things.
On Mar. 3, LG Electronics set up a base near the Okcheon village hall in Hampyeong-eup, Hampyeong-gun, South Jeolla Province, and visited nearby households to provide itinerant service. It offered free inspections of home appliances in use, such as washing machines, refrigerators, and TVs, cleaned air-conditioner filters that had not been used over the winter, and checked their operating condition. In addition, it carried out inspections to prevent electrical safety accidents, such as replacing old power strips or attaching fire-suppression patches near power sources.
LG Electronics recently signed a business agreement with Hampyeong County Office to operate the "itinerant service for home appliances in rural and fishing communities" project. The company planned to upgrade the itinerant service it had been conducting on its own into a community-focused service model in collaboration with local governments to improve service accessibility for more customers. Under this model, when a local government selects villages and households in need of the itinerant service, LG Electronics provides the service as a priority.
LG Electronics plans to roll out the service in 33 villages within Hampyeong-gun in the first half of the year. It is also reviewing collaboration with other local governments outside Hampyeong-gun and expects to further expand the areas covered by the itinerant service in the second half.
Last year, LG Electronics provided more than 1,000 itinerant services in 15 villages in South Jeolla Province, which has many islands. In particular, in the case of Hongdo in Heuksan-myeon, Sinan-gun, the one-way distance to the nearest Mokpo Service Center alone is 127 kilometers (km), and the company received positive feedback from customers who had difficulty receiving timely service. The travel distance for the itinerant service for home appliances across the 15 villages last year reached 2,000 kilometers.
LG Electronics is making various efforts to provide services one step ahead of customer requests. Examples include setting up temporary service bases in areas hit by summer flooding to provide appliance cleaning, repairs, and parts replacement, and conducting pre-inspections of system air conditioners for heating and cooling at test sites ahead of the annual College Scholastic Ability Test.
Jeong Jae-ung, head of customer value innovation at LG Electronics (executive vice president), said, "We will further expand activities that go first to where help is needed, resolve inconveniences, and help customers use products more broadly."