Adventures In Customer (DIS)Service

I chose Spinz 9 as the image for today's rant for several reasons. Like my story, it is long and convoluted and the color and shape suggest an orange. You'll find out why that's important in the next paragraph.
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In the current economic climate you would think businesses and institutions would want to be raising their customer service standards rather than lowering them. Such doesn't seem to be the case with the Orange County Performing Arts Center, at least if you go by the experience we just had...
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Earlier this year we got a flyer from the PAC touting the new Broadway Series. Since the package included Spamalot, Dream Girls and Young Frankenstein it was a foregone conclusion that we'd be buying. (They're also doing In The Heights, Xanadu and Spring Awakening but we don't care about those so much--and none of this information is relevant to the story anyway.) We ordered our tickets on Monday September 7. Then began the wait for our tickets...
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Since the cash was withdrawn from our account with such alacrity we thought surely our tickets would arrive in a timely fashion. One week passed--no tickets. Two weeks passed--still no tickets. Three weeks passed (with the show being two weeks away) and the tickets STILL hadn't arrived so we decided we needed to call the PAC to find out what was up. I was a bit surprised to find they didn't have an 800 Number to call but since their primary customers are local I could sort of accept it. Still, we called and promptly reached "Voice Mail Hell". None of the choices they offered us related to our problem and there didn't seem to be a way to connect to a live operator. Not really having a choice we made a random choice and hoped for the best. It took HALF AN HOUR for someone in the Box Office to pick up.
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Our Customer Service Agent Marquell (sp?) was nice enough and was willing to help out. Still, she couldn't tell us if, when, or where our tickets had been sent (although she WAS able to tell us we that our tickets had been paid for). She asked for a confirmation number (which I gave) but never asked for my name and address: I found this particularly surprising since I am clear NOT Robyn. She assured us that the tickets would be printed and sent out promptly. She then went on to tell us that should the tickets NOT arrive by October 16th we'd have call back YET AGAIN and they would have a set of tickets waiting for us at "Will Call."
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Needless to say I found this less than 100% satisfactory: they didn't offer us a special number to call so should we have to phone them YET AGAIN I'll have to go through "Voice Mail Hell" a second time! I don't know if you've ever picked up tickets at "Will Call" but it's not fun: there's only one window and lines can get long. Also, for us at least, "Will Call" isn't convenient to our seats so we'll be fighting crowds to get to our seats. The PAC made no offer to call US back to make sure the problem was resolved (which makes me wonder whether the Center has so many ticketing errors that they CAN'T stay on top of the problem. Still, I suppose I should be grateful it wasn't any more difficult.
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The Ahmundsen in Los Angeles and the Lyceum in San Diego both offer the same series and it really isn't that much further for us to drive, The experience left a bad taste in our mouths and we'll be thinking long and hard whether we want to buy the next series. We can only hope customer service improves...
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'nuff said.