This post is dedicated to Sears whose website and parts service department are perfect examples of how not to use a computer.

A computer in a customer service setting should be used as a tool to improve customer service, never as a limitation to your customer service. I went to Sears to purchase a replacement wheel for my craftsman lawnmower. It is a self propelled walk behind lawn mower so the back wheels are unique to certain models. I brought the old wheel as a reference, they went and found one, I paid for it and when I got home it didn't fit. It was a little too small.

I am patient by nature, so although it was frustrating, I can accept honest mistakes; the wheels did look almost identical. Here is where the problem comes. When I took the wheel back to the store I asked for a 9x2 wheel instead of the smaller 8x2 that they gave me before.  The response was "I'm sorry we can't look up parts in our computer system that way." This is the problem I have with Sears. An employee should be trained to offer customer support without the computer and the computer should be a tool for helping them with it. I asked for a manager but he just said the same thing. They said "The only way the computer will let us order a wheel for your mower is with the part number for the mower." So I go home to find the sticker with the part number has rubbed off, and I bought the mower used so I didn't have any record of the model number on any paperwork. Essentially I was looking at a very expensive mower that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have a sticker with a number on it. I decided to try the website, which also doesn't work without a model number. So I called the national parts number to talk to someone over the phone, same thing - even with the part number on the wheel they could not find it. I asked for a supervisor because I wanted someone to help me get the model number for my mower. I told him the details of my mower which were distinctive and he said "there is no way to search for the model number of your mower". Frustrated I told him to let me speak to someone about buying a mower (I thought a mower sales person might know the model number). He actually told me "I know what you are trying to do, and they won't be able to help you either, we are all limited by the same computer." I took offense to this and asked to talk to someone about buying a mower and he said the same thing and hung up. After a couple of calls I managed to talk to someone about buying a mower and told them the details of my mower and they gave me a model number in a matter of minutes. Amazingly, he said there were only 38 models of self propelled mower that Sears has made, and only one with the 7 hp engine like mine.

So with only 38 possible wheels for sears self propelled mower existing I was told it wasn't possible by 4 different people because the computer couldn't look for it. 38 models of mower could be written on a sheet of notebook paper. If I wasn’t so insistent I would have had to buy a new mower because the employees were not capable of rounding down the model number of the mower from a list of 38 by asking questions like what is the engine size, blade size, etc. A computer is intended to be a tool to do your job more efficiently. If you tell a customer you can’t help them because of the computer then you need to look at how your business is being ran, and what kind of computer system you’re using.