Terrible Customer Service from the SSE Hydro
On Saturday 16th February, myself and my wife went to see CHVRCHES who were performing at the SSE Hydro.
We had been required to buy our tickets about a year in advance of the gig and had been looking forward to it for months. We had originally purchased standing tickets for the show as we were then unaware that my wife would fall pregnant in the time in between buying tickets and the show itself.
Therefore, on the night of the gig, my wife was 6 months pregnant and was very uncomfortable with having to stand for long periods at a time. We had been advised that the venue should be able to swap our standing ticket for a seating one as long as there were seats available so we went along to the venue as soon as the doors opened at 6:30 to speak to staff about our situation.
The first venue staff we spoke to was helpful and suggested that he thought this should be no problem as more people tend to want to switch from seated to standing. However he told us that we would need to go to the Information Desk to query about this. The girl on the Information Desk was also sympathetic but advised us that only the Customer Care staff could help and that we'd need to wait for them to return to the Information Desk to help us. We ended up standing around for 20 minutes in the cold foyer waiting for a Customer Care representative to appear. (In the meantime, another couple of customers who had similar mobility issues since buying their tickets appeared behind us with similar concerns).
Eventually Karen from Customer Care arrived and already looked angry at us and the other customers as if we were wasting her time with our concerns. She told us that there were only six seats available in the whole venue (which seems unlikely for a place with 12,000 seating capacity) and that she couldn't offer us any of those as they had to be kept for "wheelchair people." [her wording]. She said this without a hint of sympathy for our situation but instead a sense of annoyance and it felt like she was implying that we were asking her to turf out disabled customers so we could 'steal their seats.' (I understand that the venue will have specialised wheelchair seating but we were not asking to be sat in that section but in any seat available in the venue. At that time we would have accepted a fold out chair placed at the back of the standing section if offered!) When we pressed her for a better answer she eventually suggested that if we came back 2 hours later (during the support band, Let's Eat Grandma, who we were also hoping to see) that there may be seats available. We accepted this answer but the manner in which we were spoken to was very insulting and my wife was very upset at this. It wasn't as much the Customer Care staff's inability to help as their tone that suggested that they had no interest in helping us and were happy to turn us away. It ended up ruining the dinner we had booked for before the gig and almost ruined the whole night.
2 hours later, at 8:45, we returned to the Information Desk but were informed that Karen had left a message for them to confirm that all the available seats had been given to wheelchair users and that there was no way they could seat us in the venue. We are big fans of the band Chvrches and we were quite excited by the idea that this would be the first live music that our unborn child would get to hear so we didn't simply give up and go home as the Customer Care staff clearly expected us to. Instead we headed into the standing section and spoke to a security guard to see if they could come up with another solution to our problem. Again, the security guard was very kind and empathetic (it appears that the only member of the SSE Hydro's staff incapable of talking to customers is the Customer Care Representative!) and suggested that we try asking at the Box Office instead of the Information Desk. We took this advice and walked back out to the Box Office where we spoke to Lindsay who was working that night. Upon hearing our situation Lindsay instantly opened a drawer which was full of seating tickets which had been returned earlier that night and offered us a choice of seating options within the venue! This was a godsend and thanks to Lindsay we were able to finally sit and enjoy the gig we had been looking forward to (even if the earlier part of the evening, including the support bands, had been ruined by how much we'd been messed around.)
However this opens up the question: if it was so simple and quick to solve our problem, why was the Customer Care staff so intent on being aggressively unhelpful and refusing to give us this option that her colleagues seemed happy to suggest? If this is the company policy of SSE Hydro to not offer any assistance to customers who do not arrive at the venue in a wheelchair, is this not a discriminatory policy which not only excludes pregnant women but also people with various mobility issues and other disabilities? (I hope the other people queueing at the Information Desk were as successful as we were in eventually finding seating and didn't have their nights ruined.) Why does the SSE Hydro employ someone to be in charge of "Customer Care" who is so rude to customers and dismissive of their needs (especially when this doesn't seem to be a problem for any of the staff working in other roles for the venue?)
After the gig, my wife wrote a letter of complaint to the "customer experience" email for the SSE Hydro to let them know about our issues and we received an automated response advising us that our email had been received and that we should expect a reply within 14 working days. That was 17 working days ago and we are yet to hear anything else from the SSE Hydro. We are starting to suspect that our complaint letter has maybe been received by the person it is about so has simply disappeared. Therefore I am sharing this story online in the hope that someone from the Hydro might finally see it and give us an explanation for the cruel indifference of the SSE Hydro Customer Care staff.
Thanks
We had been required to buy our tickets about a year in advance of the gig and had been looking forward to it for months. We had originally purchased standing tickets for the show as we were then unaware that my wife would fall pregnant in the time in between buying tickets and the show itself.
Therefore, on the night of the gig, my wife was 6 months pregnant and was very uncomfortable with having to stand for long periods at a time. We had been advised that the venue should be able to swap our standing ticket for a seating one as long as there were seats available so we went along to the venue as soon as the doors opened at 6:30 to speak to staff about our situation.
The first venue staff we spoke to was helpful and suggested that he thought this should be no problem as more people tend to want to switch from seated to standing. However he told us that we would need to go to the Information Desk to query about this. The girl on the Information Desk was also sympathetic but advised us that only the Customer Care staff could help and that we'd need to wait for them to return to the Information Desk to help us. We ended up standing around for 20 minutes in the cold foyer waiting for a Customer Care representative to appear. (In the meantime, another couple of customers who had similar mobility issues since buying their tickets appeared behind us with similar concerns).
Eventually Karen from Customer Care arrived and already looked angry at us and the other customers as if we were wasting her time with our concerns. She told us that there were only six seats available in the whole venue (which seems unlikely for a place with 12,000 seating capacity) and that she couldn't offer us any of those as they had to be kept for "wheelchair people." [her wording]. She said this without a hint of sympathy for our situation but instead a sense of annoyance and it felt like she was implying that we were asking her to turf out disabled customers so we could 'steal their seats.' (I understand that the venue will have specialised wheelchair seating but we were not asking to be sat in that section but in any seat available in the venue. At that time we would have accepted a fold out chair placed at the back of the standing section if offered!) When we pressed her for a better answer she eventually suggested that if we came back 2 hours later (during the support band, Let's Eat Grandma, who we were also hoping to see) that there may be seats available. We accepted this answer but the manner in which we were spoken to was very insulting and my wife was very upset at this. It wasn't as much the Customer Care staff's inability to help as their tone that suggested that they had no interest in helping us and were happy to turn us away. It ended up ruining the dinner we had booked for before the gig and almost ruined the whole night.
2 hours later, at 8:45, we returned to the Information Desk but were informed that Karen had left a message for them to confirm that all the available seats had been given to wheelchair users and that there was no way they could seat us in the venue. We are big fans of the band Chvrches and we were quite excited by the idea that this would be the first live music that our unborn child would get to hear so we didn't simply give up and go home as the Customer Care staff clearly expected us to. Instead we headed into the standing section and spoke to a security guard to see if they could come up with another solution to our problem. Again, the security guard was very kind and empathetic (it appears that the only member of the SSE Hydro's staff incapable of talking to customers is the Customer Care Representative!) and suggested that we try asking at the Box Office instead of the Information Desk. We took this advice and walked back out to the Box Office where we spoke to Lindsay who was working that night. Upon hearing our situation Lindsay instantly opened a drawer which was full of seating tickets which had been returned earlier that night and offered us a choice of seating options within the venue! This was a godsend and thanks to Lindsay we were able to finally sit and enjoy the gig we had been looking forward to (even if the earlier part of the evening, including the support bands, had been ruined by how much we'd been messed around.)
However this opens up the question: if it was so simple and quick to solve our problem, why was the Customer Care staff so intent on being aggressively unhelpful and refusing to give us this option that her colleagues seemed happy to suggest? If this is the company policy of SSE Hydro to not offer any assistance to customers who do not arrive at the venue in a wheelchair, is this not a discriminatory policy which not only excludes pregnant women but also people with various mobility issues and other disabilities? (I hope the other people queueing at the Information Desk were as successful as we were in eventually finding seating and didn't have their nights ruined.) Why does the SSE Hydro employ someone to be in charge of "Customer Care" who is so rude to customers and dismissive of their needs (especially when this doesn't seem to be a problem for any of the staff working in other roles for the venue?)
After the gig, my wife wrote a letter of complaint to the "customer experience" email for the SSE Hydro to let them know about our issues and we received an automated response advising us that our email had been received and that we should expect a reply within 14 working days. That was 17 working days ago and we are yet to hear anything else from the SSE Hydro. We are starting to suspect that our complaint letter has maybe been received by the person it is about so has simply disappeared. Therefore I am sharing this story online in the hope that someone from the Hydro might finally see it and give us an explanation for the cruel indifference of the SSE Hydro Customer Care staff.
Thanks
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