Twitter solves the case of Duncan Bannatyne and the missing dress

It is usually companies getting it wrong on Twitter that makes the news, but over the weekend there was an excellent example of a member of staff using Twitter to sort a problem, keep a vocal customer happy and improve the reputation of the firm.

Entrepreneur and TV star Duncan Bannatyne tweeted that his wife had left a dress on a Virgin train by mistake:

Mrs Bannatyne has just arrived, she left her dress on the 8.47 Virgin train from Milton Keynes to Euston Big reward if found

From there is started to look bad for Virgin’s reputation as Duncan Bannatyne, with 54,170 followers, started to make negative comments about Virgin such as:

Virgin customer services have not proven to be very helpful in this

and

@richardbranson C’mon mate find the bloody dress or I will have a miserable night

But then a member of Virgin staff stepped in, saying he’d seen the messages, rung his colleagues in Euston and got them to find the dress. Shortly afterwards, dress was reunited with owner, photo of said dress was tweeted out by Duncan Bannatyne and a thank you donation made to charity:

The fantastic @johno4501 is a train manager on Virgin & he took the time to locate the dress. Thank you John, thank you very much

Result: one happy man, one happy wife, one richer charity, one good corporate impression and lots of happiness all round.

The lessons from all this?

• People don’t stop talking about your firm outside of office hours
• When someone talks about your firm online, many other people are listening in too
• Motivated staff who can display initiative are good for all sorts of reasons – but their ability to react sensibly to online discussion about the firm is another one to add to the list