Trouble With Stub Hub

I don't like posting negative stuff very often, but sometimes the negative can be useful in figuring out what went wrong and how to improve it.

I was in Toronto last week for the Landscape Ontario Congress trade show (My takeaways from the event are here). When we were in town, the Leafs were playing the Hurricanes at the ACC on Tuesday night. We bought tickets through Stub Hub because the game was sold out. They were supposed to be digital tickets we were purchasing, but for some reason the broker couldn't get digital copies to us, so they said they could courier them to us overnight and have them waiting for us when we got into Toronto on Monday. If those tickets couldn't get to us they promised to get us equal or better tickets to the ones we had purchased in order to get us to the game.

We checked in to the hotel on Monday and there were no tickets. No big deal, the game wasn't until Tuesday. We talked to the folks at Stub Hub and they said they had sent them out with Fed Ex Monday and they would be there by noon on Tuesday. Noon on Tuesday rolls around and no tickets. Stub Hub talks to Fed Ex and they say that somehow the postal code of our hotel wasn't given to them properly, so the tickets couldn't be delivered. Stub Hub says now that we would have to pick up the tickets from Fed Ex, but the problem was that we were a 30 minute cab ride away from ACC and had no idea where the Fed Ex location was in relation to that. Also, Fed Ex said that the package was still with the driver and didn't know if it would get back to the depot before game time.

So only a few hours before game time we're stuck without the tickets that were promised to reach us by noon at the latest. So what can you do for us Stub Hub? How about we take you up on that offer for equal or better tickets that you might actually be able to get in our hands before game time? Nope, can't do it. The best they could do is offer us a $50 credit for a future purchase. Nice gesture, better than nothing, but it did nothing to solve our problem of getting to that game.

So we had to take a $65 cab ride downtown to pick up tickets on faith that the driver would be back at the depot before game time. We lucked out and the tickets had just arrived before we got there to pick it up (the cab meter running while we wait to pick up the tickets). No thanks to Stub Hub. No thanks to Fed Ex.

And to rub salt in the wound of this messy situation, two days later when we're on our way back from Toronto I check my twitter stream in the Calgary airport where I find that a Stub Hub Twitter account has sent me multiple messages looking to find out if there's anything they can do to help. In fact, there was something you can do to help - two days ago! When you're in the live event business, I would think that timing is a little bit more critical than that.

I talked about WestJet's use of Twitter for customer service and one of the things that stood out to me was that they responded within 20 minutes. That's the proper way to use Twitter for customer service. Twitter is all about instant communication. Waiting for two days to respond actually does the opposite of helping when timing is critical. It just makes people upset. I appreciate that they want to make it right, but it was just too late.

So I guess at the end of the day, this is my chance to vent and learn a lesson. If you're going to use Twitter for customer service, do it right and make it timely. And when you say that you're going to do something (like ensuring that you deliver tickets to you before an event), do it.