Excellent customer service only comes around so often. Most companies focus on good enough, making infrequent examples of great customer service really stand out. I recently had one of these encounters. And let me tell you, it was a series of little things that led to an overall excellent customer experience.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a large part of my job. Every trade comes with its own tools and SEO is no exception. One of my favorite tools for SEO is Raven. Raven helps me keep track of where I rank for the keywords I'm targeting, in addition to many other vital SEO tasks. It's grown to be a central tool in my week, and when it doesn't work, I can't do certain aspects of my job.

Raven was having some difficulties last month, making it a rocky few weeks for some of Raven's features. Upset, I did what any frustrated social consumer does. I tweeted about it. Enter the Raven customer service experience and Alison Groves.

Alison Groves is Raven's User Experience Manager and Social Princess, and she was quick to respond to my disgruntled tweet. Alison responded quickly to my frustration, acknowledging my problem with a quick explanation and an expectation of when the issue would be resolved. 

Text book social media customer service right? It didn't end there. What happened next made the difference between me being a satisfied Raven customer and bonafide brand advocate.

A few days later, I received a package in the mail from Alison. In it was a snazzy Raven t-shirt, a hand-written note from Alison, and her business card.

The note further acknowledged my frustration and offered an apology for the disruption in service, reinforcing our Twitter conversation from the week before.

Alison could have left things the way they were with the Twitter conversation, but she didn't. The extra time she took to write and send me a note made me feel extra special as a customer. Another stroke of brilliance in Raven's customer service experience is the t-shirt. Not only do I get a nifty t-shirt, but Alison has also given me a tool to be an consumer advocate for Raven.

The day I received the package I tweeted about it, happily thanking Alison for her customer service. As a final stroke of brilliance, her response referenced our initial Twitter conversation, providing a great finishing touch to a seamless customer service experience. Thank you, Raven. (And thanks for hiring good people such as Alison).

In the end, it wasn't just one thing that Raven did, but it was a series of well-planned, graciously excecuted steps in their customer service experience. It was all the little things that ended up having a big impact. When was the last time you received excellent customer service, and what about the customer service do you remember the most? Leave your great customer service stories in the comments below.