It varies dramatically. I would venture to say that some of my worst and best customer service experiences have been here in Argentina. On the worst side, telefonica, on the best side *some* of the small shops, cafes, hardware stores, etc that I frequent. The ones who treat me poorly generally do not continue to get my business. Most negative experiences have been along the lines of not accepting responsibility for a defective product or 0 patience in communicating to find or resolve something. Positive experiences are comparable to doing business with a close family member. There are a number of small shop entrepreneurs that I find interesting to hang out and chat with. They are energetic, upbeat, and I enjoy hearing about how they established their business. It's usually no simple feat, full of twists and turns like a novel, and they are often very open with the story. Also they can be a great source of advice for their area of expertise, or even for life in general.
Telefonica deserves mention here as an anecdote though. Service from phone companies and utilities in the US is generally very poor, but I've discovered that in Telefonica Argentina I have found a new low. My wife and I live on the same property as my in-laws in a separate house. We have been sharing the in-laws internet, but decided over a year ago that it's time to get our own separate phone line with DSL. We walked into the office and filled out an order, and they said sure, no problem, we'll have you set up within a couple weeks. A few weeks went by and we began the unending litany of calls that continues to this day. After about 30 days, they finally called us and explained that no, our area (Between Florencio Varela and Bosquez) is saturated and they are not capable of offering any new DSL lines, would we like a basic land line instead? No, we already have cell phones, so thank you, we only want a new line if it also includes internet. We were put on a waiting list, and maybe 6 months later they called to say that DSL was available, and sold us a 6M package. I knew obviously this was a huge exaggeration as my in-laws are at best achieving 1.2M on their 3M package, but fine I thought, at least maybe I can get enough improvement to make it all the way through a youtube video or skype call without problems. Plus, they offer a good promotional price so of course I agreed. Great, we'll be out in the next 30 days to install it. More waiting more calls, and finally about 6 months again, they finally sent out a technician to install the line back to our house. He installed the line and said that a different technician would be out tomorrow morning to install the modem and get the internet going. "Is that really tomorrow morning, or..?" I asked. "Oh, definitely tomorrow..." his voice trails off... eye contact... "or maybe sometime after that." About a week later a couple guys came out with a modem, and resolved a problem that they had connected us to a completely different phone number and we were getting someone else's phone calls. Then they hook up the modem and do some testing. "Oh," he says," there's a problem here. I can't certify this modem to give you the 6M speeds for the package you were sold. You have to call telefonica and change it over to the 1.5 - 3M package." "That's ok," we tell him. "We kind of guessed that already, just leave the modem and we'll contact them and switch it over. " "Sorry, my job is to certify the modem to the speed you ordered, so I can't leave the equipment here. Do you want to keep the phone line, or should I disconnect it?" For me, this is the low point of the story, because the equipment is *supposedly* up and running, and it seems to me that in a sane company, the tech guy would just make a quick call to the sales dept and initiate moving me over to the 3M plan. But no, I have to decide in that moment whether I want to risk dragging things out even further or not, so I opted to keep the line, thinking that it wouldn't be that complicated to get the guy back out here with the modem, but that getting a guy to reconnect the line might take another 6 months. So, as you might guess, that was about 2 months ago, and Telefonica makes no commitment as to when this will be resolved. Still no modem, and on top of this, the land line itself went dead, which we reported a couple weeks ago, and nobody has come out to look at that either. I am a bit suspicious that the truth is they are still saturated, and the whole thing was staged as a bait and switch to get me to accept a land line with no DSL as they tried to sell me last year. Neighbors in the area who have attempted to get internet in the area have met with similar difficulties, and I do not personally know anyone who has successfully gotten internet up and running. I suppose I should just be thankful that the internet I share with the in-laws has been pretty reliable although slow. At least it's not constantly blacking out like the electricity here.
