My experiences with Telecom & Arnet in Buenos Aires

[jez]

I have been a Telecom client for 5 years and an Arnet client for 4 years.

Last month my Internet service stopped working so I called Arnet to get it fixed. After doing some tests with me sat in front of the PC they said they would call me back the same day and arrange to send an engineer.

They didn't call me back the same day, so I called them again 3 more times during that week, each time being told they would call me back the same day.

A week after the first call they arranged for an engineer to come to my home the following week to see the problem. He said it was a problem with the Telecom line, the next day a Telecom engineer came and agreed it was a problem with the Telecom line.

I waited a week and it still wasn't working, called Telecom for an update and they said I had to talk to Arnet as it was their problem. Called Arnet, they didn't have anything registered on their system, so we went round and round in circles with them saying they would send an engineer and never calling me back. I called every day of 10 days each time getting the same lie that someone would call me back the same day.

Finally a Telecom engineer called at the apartment with no warning (luckily I was at home) and he said it was an Arnet problem. A few days later another Telecom engineer rang the doorbell (again luckily I was at home) and after about 10 minutes on the phone to Arnet and a change of 'port' my internet finally worked.

31 days without internet and 4 engineer visits, I finally had my service back.

Arnet will now discount me one months service from my next bill.

It's not my Spanish that made the process take so long (as my Argentina girl friend made some of the calls) it's just the typical customer service of this country.

I also have stories of bad service from Directv, the building consorcio and Falabella...it's what makes living in this country so entertaining.

 

[flyfreely]

I've had very similar problems... The worst and most surprising to me was DirecTV. You'd think the are an american company and would have a better standard. I have found them to be the worst of all. They billed my credit card 5 times for directvPlus and never installed the service. And then they made me deposit the money one more time with pago facil. They don't admit that they billed me. They say "we cannot bill international credit cards". I have emailed and faxed them my statements detailing the CC transaction numbers so they call visa and verify it themselves. They still don't believe me. They played pingpong with my phone call for hours. One time I heard a lot of laughter in the background, the guys said "oh, sorry, we are changing shifts now... gotta go"... the most unprofessional company ever. I finally cancelled my credit card and 4 months later they called me to let me know that there was a problem with my credit card and that I owed them 4 months of service. I told them that there was a problem with them and that they owed me 5 installations of DirecTVPlus. The reason I switched to DirecTV 2 years ago is because of the same exact story with cablevision and fibertel, the service didn't work for weeks and they didn't discount a penny from the service. When I told them I wanted to cancel, they said I couldn't until I paid the bill (which was billing ahead). They said they would refund the money after I canceled. So, I switched to Directv and didn't pay the bill. One advice I have is to never ever, ever give your credit card here for any recurrent service. I have always regretted...

And I won't even get into my telecentro nightmare stories... I'm still disputing those with my CC company...