Bad customer service

It was a quiet evening at home a month or so ago and I was kicked back on the couch listening to the R&B channel on my television from DirecTV when a song was played by Boz Scaggs and my mind shot back to the '70s when his Lowdown album was one of the biggest sellers of that decade. That prompted me to go to Pollstar on my computer to see if he was still touring and, if so, was he going to be anyplace close to McCook? To my surprise and pleasure, he was scheduled to appear at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City on August 15th so I then hit Ticketmaster on my favorite key to find tickets.

By the time a concert is announced to the public, ticket scalpers have secured most of the best seats but this time there were two VIP seats on the front row for sale and I quickly bought them. After the purchase had been confirmed, I called my son Will to see if he wanted to meet me there and since Will goes to concerts nationwide as well as Canada and Mexico, I knew he would want to go if he didn't have other plans and sure enough he was excited about it too.

I requested that my tickets be mailed to me when I bought them and waited patiently for the next couple of weeks for them to come but they didn't so I emailed Ticketmaster. They replied rather quickly, several hours later on the same day, apologized for the mix-up and told me they would send me an email with the tickets attached so I could print them at home. Sure enough, the next day, I got the email with the tickets attached.

The problem came when I tried to print them. One ticket was on one page, the other ticket was on the second page but only the first page would print. I tried it three times with the same result. So the next morning, I took it up to the college and recruited an IT friend of mine during his lunch break to see if he could get both pages to print on my college computer. He went through several screens on the monitor but he was finally able to do that. I went down to the copy room, picked them up and was reading the fine print on the way back to my office when I saw a notice that only the first printing would be valid and any duplicate printing would result in me not being admitted to the concert.

So I emailed Ticketmaster again telling them about my problem. They again apologized but asked me for my confirmation number and the last four digits of the credit card I used which I sent to them but didn't really understand why. The next day they confirmed receipt of my email and also confirmed that the information contained in it was correct but that since I had purchased VIP tickets, I would have to contact the VIP branch of Ticketmaster to get my problem solved. This is when I started to get angry.

I made it clear in the very first email I sent them about how much money I had spent per ticket and that should have told them who I should have been communicating with but, as a lot of you discover when dealing with customer service reps, it didn't. So it took them almost two weeks to point me in the right direction.

I contacted the VIP branch of Ticketmaster and from then on, my complaint was processed quickly. I was told that the bar codes on the tickets had been reset and all I had to do was go to my membership page at Ticketmaster and print my tickets which I did. I've been assured the tickets will be valid for front row seating tomorrow night but I don't take anything for granted anymore.

I'm picking up Will in Seward where his wife is from and I will be armed with all the communication I've had with Ticketmaster since this fiasco began a couple of weeks ago. Fifteen different emails going both ways between me and Ticketmaster when one from me and one from them should have been sufficient.

I'll let you know next week how things turned out!