Experiences with Customer Service

I'm not the first one to complain about customer service here in Chile, nor the last. Emily has posted about it a couple times. Gringas and Chileans complain about it, because it, for the most part, sucks.

Today I went to the grocery store to return yogurt that was bad although it wasn't expired...at first they said they wouldn't take it back because I had bought it a week earlier. Too much time had passed. The girl said the store can't be responsible for yogurt that perhaps was left out of the refrigerator. I told her I hadn't left it out of the refrigerator. "Pero 'ta maaalo", dije varias veces y me salió hasta un poco flaite. Te lo juro, me desconocí. So I asked to speak to the girl's boss. She went and got him and he told me the same thing, that more than a week had passed, no go. I told him that doesn't change the fact that they sold a bad product. After a bit more discussion and stubborness on both ends, he went to talk to his boss, I guess. He disappeared and came back and then went and changed my yogurt. "The customer is always right" mantra doesn't exist here. Not that it should...

Dealing with customer service in Chile you basically have to play the role of your own attorney and make your case on why they should change the product for you. (I had bought expired yogurt in that supermarket once before, but the date on the receipt was later than the date on the yogurt, so they exchanged it with no problem, although technically I could have bought more yogurt since then and returned a previously bought yogurt with a later receipt.) And it's almost not worth it to even deal with expired yogurt. Other times I've had problems, I just throw it out. But I like to have a righteous little brawl sometimes. If I ever move back to the States, I might actually miss arguing with customer service here. It's kind of fun, in small quantities..especially if you arguing about a few yogurts that cost like 50 cents each.

Comparing customer services...Vuko plays the electric guitar. He has been to several music stores in Santiago and Viña del Mar and has tried out many guitars. The salesmen are often a bit hesitant about letting customers try out the guitars, and actually one time Vuko asked to try a guitar, and the salesman replied, "Are you going to buy it?" Of course Vuko replied, "Well, obviously not if I don't try it." But seriously, can you really ask a customer that? Apparently so. Total asshole question, are you going to buy it? We went to Guitar Center in the States (the highlight of Vuko's trip to Minnesota) and he was blown away by the customer service (as well as the walls packed with hundreds of guitars). We walked in and he started looking at guitars and the sales guy came up to us and asked if he wanted to try one, and then he set Vuko up at a huge amp and told him to take his time. And, luckily, the sales guy even spoke Spanish, which was a total relief for me because I don't speak guitar talk in Spanish or English. Vuko bought a couple effects there, but both of them were more expensive than he'd seen on the competition's website (with him he had printouts of the products and prices he'd seen at both American Boutique and Guitar Center) and Guitar Center met the competition's prices. Whereas if you try to do that in Chile, the salesmen would tell you, "Well, if American Boutique has better prices, go there."

Now to a degree I understand that customer service here has to be different. It's a different culture. In Chile, plagiarism is customary, photocopying entire books is normal. Universities are surrounded by photocopying places. (Granted books here are expensive.) Chileans come across to me as thrifty people.

Lots of Chileans (and perhaps Latin Americans in general) try to find loopholes in store's policies in their favor. I heard that a store in Florida actually had to start a rule of not letting Latin Americans (from countries outside the US) buy cameras and then return them a week later. Turns out people were buying the cameras, taking photos of their vacations, transferring the photos to a pendrive and then returning the camera at the end of the vacation. So I understand that "The customer is always right" probably wouldn't work at all here, because the companies might go bankrupt. But even so, customer service here is much worse than it could be. But I s'pose Chilean customer service does it's part to slow comsumeristic globalization, because who wants to shop when the vendedores (sellers) can be such a pain in the ass?

I've had problems with customer service in the States as well. I remember one time I had to hire a lawyer to fight credit card fraud. Somehow, someone got into my mail, got my new credit card and then charged like $800 in cell phone bills. I found out a month or two later thru a bitchy phone call from the credit card company where the lady was trying to accuse me of charging the cell phone bills (which were in someone else's name). She didn't believe me that I had no idea that someone had gotten a hold of my new credit card. Luckily, as a University student I only had to pay the University lawyer $15 to take care of my case. But this is the exception to the customer service rule in the United States. Whereas mediocre to bad customer service is pretty much the rule here in Chile.