As any homeowner can attest, scheduling appliance maintenance tends to be quite the drag. Not only does it force someone to take time away from their day job but it also requires heaps of patience in waiting for a repair person to show up and for them to do a quality job. Understanding this for the bother it is, Sears announced this week that it now offers the ability to fix home appliances faster than ever — to the tune of roughly 40 minutes quicker, that is.

In essence, Sears Home Services now makes its team of master technicians available for any repair, even if the technician isn’t physically at the appointment. By leaning on live video and uploaded photos, any Sears technician has the ability to instantly converse with a master tech in order to properly repair a wide range of appliances — even non-Sears products — as quickly as possible. To help Sears accomplish this, the appliance giant teamed up with GoToAssist to outfit each of its technician’s smartphones with the GoToAssist Seeit application, which provides step-by-step repair instructions and instant feedback from a master technician.

“No one likes taking time out of their busy schedules for their appliances to be repaired, especially if it takes longer than anticipated or requires multiple service appointments,” said Sean Skelley, president of Sears Home Services. “Now our technicians can use their smartphones to live-stream video and photos of appliance problems to our most experienced experts, who can coach them toward a solution and get your appliance up and running again quickly. It’s like they have master technicians in their pockets.”

The GoToAssist Seeit app has proven to reduce maintenance time by as much as 40 minutes. While it certainly won’t always cut that much time off a visit, the fact that it’s been shown to decrease the amount of time required by a technician could help make Sears’ new approach an instant success.