Dreaming since 1980....

Customer service, the bad and the good…

In this day and age you would think that most businesses would focus on customer service as as establishment you want repeat clientele and good word of mouth. Not much out there is such a niche that you can not go elsewhere  nor can you lose long time customers. This is my little story about actually the Sacramento Kings. Yes they are bad, not as badly as their record shows, but they are a VERY young team with a lot of talent. We see spurts of greatness and usually 40 minutes of decent basketball, at least as of late.

Being a local kid I love my local sports teams. I am not sure how people can root for teams that are not local unless you got influenced by your elders but that’s a argument for any other day. Anyways I’ve gone to a few games this year and earlier this week myself, my cousin and friend purchased tickets as part of the “Pooh” pack. If you are familiar with team you know for what, but Pooh is a rookie guard on the team. He’s 5’ 9”, quick and brings energy. He’s the King’s new Spud Webb pretty much. Anyways the pack includes tickets, shirt, special plush and a meet and greet. We get to the game, get our tickets, get our vouchers and watch the game against the Blazers. We get told we don’t have to pick up our stuff at any particular game.

The game goes to OT, where sadly the Kings lose but it was a good game. Satisfied with the game we go to retrieve our stuff but no one is there. We are then directed to Information and given the round around for about 20 minutes. Long story short we leave without anything in hand, frustration and a card for marketing. Customer service fail. At this point we are ticked off enough not to listen to post game radio or anything else, just how upset we were. And it takes a lot for me to get mad about things and for me to speak up about it is rare but happens. Usually I will probably leave a Yelp review, not visit the place anymore and just share my experience with other. This was one of the those times I had to vent though.

Maybe it was because it was my home team and maybe because I am scared they are going to leave the city but I vented. I vented on Twitter and went searching for some emails. After some digging I sent some emails in the early morning and waited.

I got a Twitter message and email back in the afternoon. We were going to get our “pack” as well as get them autographed by Pooh and get some comped tickets to another game. I would have been satisfied with a food voucher. I want to thank the Kings, the Twitter person and Mindy for the Kings for making things right. It was one of those classic cases of quick, prompt resolution and over-delivering that rectified the situation. I know how hard it is to manage a large group of people firsthand and you can’t have everyone be on the same page when you have hundreds of employees working at the same time. But the fact that they fixed the issue efficiently shows at least some people care in the organization.

Will I go to more games this year, probably. Would I have had I not gotten responded to, probably not so much. Just shows you once again not only the power of the internet but that sometimes going that extra effort saves you a lot of negativity and you have 3 grateful fans still.

Thats my story at 3am, sorry for the tangled maze of direction on the above btw