Apparently not for the Marlins

When you think of a professional sports team like the Miami Marlins, you would expect that their customer service would be top-notch. Being season ticket holders for the third year in a row, I have learned that the Marlins’ customer service is no Disney-like customer service.

At Disney World, employees (known as “castmembers”) have to literally smile at all times… even if they want to stab you in the eye for being an annoying customer with a ridiculously horrible attitude. But I do not expect Marlins employees to hold a smile on their face as they look up, print out, and give me my ticket. (Yes, one castmember did this to me once. He wouldn’t stop smiling for a second.)

I do however, expect professionalism from employees I encounter. Instead what I experienced was nothing but complete laziness on their part.

It all began when we didn’t receive all of our season tickets. Tickets arrived this year in these books. One book for each set of tickets for a particular seat. We have three seats in our section. We only received one seat, seat 11.

I was aware that many friends were receiving their ticket packages just fine. We called the Marlins and spoke to many representatives who gave us this BS excuse about “growing pains” with the new ballpark. Uh… you have been selling season tickets for almost 20 years and just now you are having growing pains? Apparently, we were one of the lucky few who had their packages messed up and never printed.

So, we were told to print out our tickets one by one through the online service. The online service is great. We haven’t had any problems with it. The only thing is that we are wasting a lot of printer ink printing out 2 tickets for every game. Ink is not cheap either.

Finally, after getting tired of printing out tickets on my own, I called the Marlins once again. I spoke to a nice lady who I asked to please send us the remaining tickets. I didn’t care if they didn’t come in a pretty booklet. I just wanted regular hard-tickets. It wasn’t anything crazy to ask for. We were supposed to receive our pretty Marlins tickets before June.

Marlins' customer service needs to get some tips from Disney. They are always so professional. Credit: DapsforDisneyMagic.com

Fast forward a couple of weeks later. No sign of the tickets and it is already June 3rd. Yet another phone call was made to the Marlins ticket office and we were told the tickets would be shipped overnight through FedEx. Next day, no tickets. We had a game that day that we needed tickets for. Another phone call was made.

Please read the following because it did happen. You cannot make this stuff up.

Husband: (addresses issue… no tickets, game today, bla bla bla)

Marlins Guy: Uh… we forgot to ship them out.

Husband: Um, ok. So do I print out my tickets from today and expect the others this week?

Marlins Guy: Uh yea. We’ll ship them out overnight. Actually, I have to find them now.

*Facepalm* You forget to ship our tickets and then you say that you lost them?! What?! Who says that to a customer? Plus, why wait for the very last minute to mail out the tickets that you have to overnight them? Of course they only decided to overnight them once we called because apparently they forgot about us.

Anyway, there is a happy ending. We (finally) received our tickets this morning. That only took like four months to get everything settled.

I love my Marlins and appreciate all they do, but customer service needs to “ponerse los patines” (or in English, “put on their skates”) and get to it. And yes, there are Marlins employees who go above and beyond to make us happy customers. But for the rest… it is 2012. We have been around for too long for this to happen.