Our friends on Twitter save the Day

This is a quick message.

On Saturday, a delivery that should have arrived at the bookshop didn't. It was supposed to be delivered by Yodel. This isn't the first time that this has happened and it seems that Yodel are not having a very good time of it at the moment. I guess their problem is that they are supposed to deliver parcels to people at agreed times and singularly fail to do so. Yeah, that's probably it.
There were a few customer orders in the box that never arrived and so we tried to get in touch with Yodel to ask where the box might be. We tracked it online, and apparently it was in a van, but somehow didn't quite make it to the shop.

On Monday, we kept a close eye on its' progress.
At 9.17am it was 'Out for delivery'. Excellent, we thought. It will arrive sometime soon.
When we looked again at about midday it stated that at 11.41am it had been 'unable to gain access' to our shop. Mmm, interesting. I don't remember closing the bookshop at 11.30-12.00 in the busiest retailing week of the year. Oh well.
Then, at 12.21 a new message came up. It had been delivered and had been signed for by somebody called Steve.
Who is Steve? We'd love to meet you and get our box of books. But that is unlikely to ever happen, as you don't actually exist.

So, this put us in a tricky position.

We checked through all the orders that hadn't arrived and re-ordered all the books that customers had asked for to arrive before Christmas.
Sadly there were two books that were no longer in stock at our suppliers.
This was bad. Very bad. We had promised these customers the books before Christmas and because of Yodel's shiteness, we were going to struggle to fulfill this.

So, this morning I sent out a message on Twitter.

' I need help to find 2 books for our customers that stupid Yodel have lost & are now out of stock at the publishers'

I am not going to name the books as the recipients of these may read this blog, but magic happened and we found both books and two of the people who follow our twitterfeed (and who we follow because they are superace) @lucebrett and @kaitharshayr helped us find, buy and deliver the books to the Big Green Bookshop.

This is a great example of how brilliant and thoughtful our customers (I think possibly a better word would be friends) are and also how rather wonderful a 'social networking site' can be.

Lovely friends. Lovely Twitter.

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