Comments on Review Maze: Seatwave.com Ticket Exchange Service: Unprofession...

As for your position at Review Centre, if you thin...

2011-12-13T15:21:04.998-08:00

As for your position at Review Centre, if you think of it more thoroughly, it's not that good really. Currently you have 4.1 out of 5 stars. This is about 82%. But for a service like this even 95% is not a very good rating. According to Review Centre you have 85% of customers who recommend your service. Again, this is really low for a ticket exchange service. This means you have 15% of customers who have not been satisfied by your service and this is an enormous percentage.

So you have a lot to improve both in your service and on your website. And the right way for doing it is not to say your almost useless Customer Support Team has been great. Neither it is to use some clichés about how you do everything to make it right. There are more practical and effective ways to improve your service and I hope you will do it eventually for the sake of your future customers and long term success of your website.

Thanks for your comment, guys. I appreciate it. Bu...

2011-12-13T15:20:41.630-08:00

Thanks for your comment, guys. I appreciate it. But I do not agree with many of the things you've written.

To begin with, even if we agree to call the sellers "fans", this does not change the fact that the vast majority of them sell tickets on Seatwave for (often huge) profit. But anyway, it's not that important.

I do not agree that you do everything you can to make it right. I can think immediately of at least 5 things you can do in order to improve your service and probably even more if I think further. Obviously, I am not a Seatwave's employee or shareholder in order to tell you how to improve your work and business, so I won't. But just to comment on your comment...

In my case the tickets were sent 3 days after my purchase. I believe, you don't send the tickets yourselves but apparently you have not made it clear enough to your sellers that they should not delay the shipment. Neither you've made it clear to them that they are the ones that potentially could lose money after they fail to send tickets on time. Instead, the first thing your support does when somebody contacts it is to tell you're not going to refund. This is ridiculous and it is very far from "doing everything to make things right".

I understand that UPS is a third party service but since you've been working with them for quite a long time you should have known their delivery speed. Instead, when I said to your support that the scheduled delivery will be after my flight they answered "don't worry, it will arrive 3 days earlier". This is again completely unprofessional and even more ridiculous when the actual delivery was not 3 days earlier but 4 days later. :)

Furthermore, if the return address is always Seatwave's office then your responsibility is even bigger. It's Ok that you want to protect your sellers' privacy but thus you take also part of their responsibility. And by the way, why do you have to protect the sellers when the buyers do not get the same protection? But again, this is just a detail. The more important thing is it's your responsibility to ensure that the delivery will happen on time which automatically assumes that the shipment should happen on time.

Another statement of yours I definitely do not agree with is that your Customer Support Team was trying to resolve the issue continuously regardless of my post on Twitter. I contacted them 6 days before my post on Twitter and until a couple of hours after my post on Twitter there was nothing constructive and useful offered by them. In fact it was just the opposite. And it was more like I was in contact with them, not the support team keeping contact with me. They were busy wild guessing the time of the UPS delivery and more important trying to tell me that everything on your side was done as it should be. But it was not and it was not done properly from the very beginning. It was clear that the tickets would not arrive on time but your support team lost days in absolutely useless and pointless arguments. They lost days of my time as well. If I were you and if I were really concerned about my customers, I would have had a very serious conversation with the current support team. And I would make it perfectly clear that if they continue behaving in this vein, I will fire them. Of course, I don't know whether they act this way because they are naturally stupid or because they've been instructed to act like this.

I appreciate that you respected your part of the deal in the end but this does not change the fact that your support was awful prior to contacting you via Twitter. It does not change the fact that obviously there is something wrong in your whole workflow having in mind that 15 days were needed for a delivery of tickets marked as ready for shipping.

We are a fan to fan ticket exchange and we do not ...

2011-12-09T07:34:45.481-08:00

We are a fan to fan ticket exchange and we do not rely on luck, we work tirelessly to ensure that all orders are fulfilled and that our buyers get to their chosen event. We don’t deny that sometimes things will go wrong , but what we will do is ensure that we do everything we can to make it right as we have done in your case. We appreciate that receiving the tickets a few hours before the event is not how we would like it to be, it’s far from ideal however, our main aim was not to disappoint you as we know how important events such as these mean to our customers and as you’ve said, a refund was not what you wanted or requested.

With regard to delivery times, as we’re sure you can understand UPS is a third party and therefore the delivery speed and delivery service is out of our control we rely on the information that is presented to us and do our very best to relate that back to our buyers. We understand that when travelling to another City or indeed Country the times and logistics can be rather tricky and so we do advise our Sellers to send the tickets as soon as the order is confirmed and to use a suitable delivery method. The return address will always be given as a Seatwave office to ensure the Seller’s privacy.

We at Seatwave believe that every customer interaction is important and acted upon and that our guarantees are always fulfilled. This is something that is crucial to us as can see from our ‘manifesto’ on our website. I’m sure you will agree that our Customer Support Team were in contact with you trying to resolve this issue continuously regardless of your post on Twitter.

Our intension is to make buying tickets as easy as possible and to offer help along the way. However, from the details you have given we can appreciate that this has been a very disappointing experience for you despite the fact that we got you to the gig in the end. The vast majority of our customers do receive their tickets on time and are happy with the service received. However, we can assure you that the feedback you have provided will be used to further develop the way we do things to ensure that Seatwave stays rated the number one ticket site on the Review Centre.