Service Calls - An Antiquated Business Model

Last week I had an experience that I am sure everyone reading this post has had at some point. My family has lived in the new house we built for almost two years now (end of May to be exact). As luck would have it, one of my carefully, over researched appliance purchases let me down. My husband worked from home a couple of weeks ago to be there during the "window" of time that the repair person would come out. There was a problem with the computer board in the stove so a new one had to be ordered since this was not a piece commonly carried in a repair truck. The bigger problem was that this meant that my husband or I would have to be at home for the return trip. We are both far more fortunate than most in that we each have the flexibility to perform a good deal of our work from our home office. This doesn't make it convenient to be there however as we both need to meet with people throughout the day and it's a 20 minute drive to our offices in town. My husband had a meeting scheduled for the day that the repair person needed to come back out to install the part so it was my turn. Our time "window" was from 8am - 12pm. I was quite sure that we would be first on the list given that they knew exactly what needed to be done at our house and should know the exact amount of time it would take as well. There were no mysteries to this job. And since this was a follow up visit, I would have thought someone in the process may have thought it good business to be respectful of our time.
I couldn't have been more wrong. We were absolutely last on the list. In fact, I received a call at 11:30 to let me know that the repair person was running late due to other jobs taking additional time. So, the person showed up at my house sometime around 12:30. The repair took all of about 15 minutes. I was pleasant to my repair person because I am quite certain that his route is given to him by someone else each day based on the calls that have been received and appointments that have been scheduled. So he really was not the person who needed to hear my frustration. He did the best he could and he correctly diagnosed my problem on his first call and fixed it on his second trip.
The problem lies with companies who have not adapted their service models to recognize that most American households have two working occupants. And beyond that has anyone ever been pleased by the fact that they had to commit to sitting in their house for at least 4 consecutive hours just waiting. Even when your problem is solved, do you feel good about the time that you lost because you had to wait. In my case, the oven that I had purchased from Sears had only been in use for about 20 months when it failed.
I do not believe that Sears is alone in continuing to operate such an antiquated service system. But I do think that they need to look at how some other businesses are handling service calls. I am not always happy with the local station interference on my Dish when it rains, but whenever I have to call them they have an immediate resolution or a service person who is seemingly hawking over my neighborhood. He calls me directly and tell me an exact time that he will be at my house. That is turning a negative customer experience into a positive one. So, thank you  Dish for the excellent customer service. Keep working on that whole rain problem though. :)
Please let me know about your experiences with service calls. Who has a good service model and who wastes your time unnecessarily.