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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:02)
Phil Thompson, welcome to the WP minute.
Phil Thompson (00:05)
Thanks for having me, Matt. I appreciate it.
Matt Medeiros (00:07)
You work for one of our lovely and most long-term pillar supporters here at the WP Minute, Pressable. So thank you very much for your support. For the folks in the audience who might not know who you are and what you do, what do you do at Pressable? What's the day-to-day like?
Phil Thompson (00:24)
Yeah, so I help run the support team here at Pressable. So my job is really making sure that all the ladders and tools and everything like that are in place for the team and they have everything that they need in order to help our customers. I've been with Pressable for a bit, but I had a brief vacation in the middle. So I was here for a few years, left for a couple of years, and then came back. So I just recently came back this year.
Matt Medeiros (00:53)
You didn't go to like Drupal or Wix, did you?
Phil Thompson (00:55)
No, I did not become a trader on the CMS front. ⁓ I went more into just unrelated tech and then back into e-commerce and then back into WordPress. So yeah, have not betrayed my roots.
Matt Medeiros (00:59)
You
You know, I often, this is just a bit of a tangent, but whenever anyone brings up like, you know, like I had another chapter in like a non-tech space, I often admire, I often admire that. And I think about, yeah, sometimes this tech thing, especially with AI, which I'm sure we'll talk about, I'm just like, I just wanna go cut grass. Like, just let me cut grass. Like the robots aren't doing it yet. There's no AI automation in the way. I feel like.
is just less complication there. Sometimes I'm that's what I want to do with my time in my life. ⁓
Phil Thompson (01:46)
Yeah, I
definitely hear that. mean, career-wise, I've covered like, I've covered about as much as you can cover in completely unrelated jobs. ⁓ And, you know, looking back at like pre-tech life, you know, I definitely hear what you're saying there. There's some comfort in, I guess, the pace ⁓ and the simplicity.
Matt Medeiros (02:02)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, this is ⁓ a good opening to ask, how do you weave in like the non-technical, I think marketers ruin everything, right, myself included, and SEO kind of ruins everything too, because it just becomes like this programmatic response. Once again now in the face of AI, like, what is natural organic content going to look like? Are humans gonna vote for that over some AI-generated response?
And I think about our roles in tech and especially yours with customer support. My full time job is with Gravity Forms, not in support, but I see that I watch what the team does. And I think we fall into this trap of like, you know, how to optimize, how to, you know, okay, it's a caching problem, step one, step two, step three, outcome. Is the customer happy? Yes, no, let's move to the next thing. But I'm looking for like,
how you weave in the more human side to your customer support approach. Like what are those intangibles you think are important for customer support that aren't just like ticket close time, response speed, know, stuff like that.
Phil Thompson (03:24)
Yeah, for sure. So I'm going to take a little side detour and give you some background context. So when I first moved into, I fell into customer service accidentally and that's a whole other story. But ⁓ when I decided to pursue it and I moved over to the tech sector, ⁓ I started with a, at the time small Toronto, I'm in Toronto, Canada, ⁓ a Toronto based tech startup and
their CEO was fanatical about support. And that's a term that, you know, like a lot of companies will toss around. I have spent in my career, I've, I've spent a good amount of time connecting with other companies, connecting with people in similar positions at other companies, you know, see what they're struggling with, how they tackle the problems I've faced, et cetera, et cetera. And so I have met a lot of people in a lot of companies that say like, yeah, we're crazy about support. ⁓
99 % of them don't actually mean it. They think they are, but they don't actually mean it. ⁓ But anyways, this CEO, he was actually fanatical about support. ⁓ And his one guiding mantra in everything that we did as a company was you take care of the customer and the customer will take care of your business. so as a result, the customer support team was actually the most powerful team at our company.
overrode the say of anyone basically. ⁓ And we had basically any lever that we wanted at our disposal. You have a conversation with a customer and because of that, for whatever context, you want to give them the next six months for free, go for it. You don't even have to ask anybody. You don't have to ask a manager. Just do it. If you had a reason and you thought that reason was good, go for it.
That element of actually like really caring about the person, really caring about the customer, that really stuck with me. You know, we had this, we had this program, this surprise and delight program where we just do like spontaneous, nice things for a customer. You know, you're talking to a customer and they're calling you from the road and they're, you know, they're like, yeah, you know, busy day today. I had to, you know, skip lunch cause I to go to this next job site, blah, blah, blah. Well, where's your next job site? We'll send over a pizza. You know, stuff like that.
And it was, there was no metric to back that into on a business ⁓ standpoint. There wasn't like, okay, well let's track, you know, revenue retention, let's track, you know, ARR growth, anything like that. It was just like, if you're doing the right thing for this person as a person, ⁓ that is the metric that we track. And so that ⁓ personal touch, that personal consideration, that really...
That really connected with me. I'm a people person and so like I loved that. I loved the kindness. I love the empathy behind that. And so that's always something that I've always brought forward with me. so bringing it current with Pressable, ⁓ obviously when we're going out and hiring for our support team, ⁓ there's a very high standard that we have for technical knowledge. ⁓ When we're hiring from other competitors in the hosting industry.
we're typically hiring their more senior level ⁓ employees because we don't have any tiered support in Pressable. You get our best person right from the start. But on top of the technical component and that knowledge basis that they have, there's a question of just like, is this a great person? Are they?
Are they empathetic? Are they going to be laughing and telling jokes with our customers, etc? ⁓ And if the answer is no, it's like, okay, well, yeah, you are a WordPress genius, but you're just not the person that we're looking for. ⁓ And then when we hire those people, ⁓ first of all, there's often a little bit of untraining that we have to do ⁓ because ⁓ one of the big things is like, listen.
Matt, like we hired you because yeah, you know WordPress, you know hosting, like you're a genius, but you are also just a great person. And so like, be a great person. There is no script. There is no like, you know, set rule book of you have to do this, you can't do that, et cetera. Be yourself, you know, be yourself with the customer and, and you know, if that means you're laughing and joking around and having fun with them, great.
And obviously there's going to be times when that's appropriate and where it's not. If somebody's upset and angry and stressed out, we're not going to start sending them gifts and funny memes or something. ⁓ So there's a time and place for everything. But it's really encouraging that with the team of just like, listen, be yourself. There's not a script. Don't copy paste your messaging that you've used for the last 15 years because you don't need to do that. Just be a person. That's what our customers appreciate.
And again, it's really, like, it's not, you know, setting that into a specific metric of like, okay, well, did you do this? Did you do that? Et cetera. Because if we're really truly doing that, like in an organic way, there isn't a direct, you know, standard benchmark measurable around that. And, you know, it's not like, hey, did you do this? Did you do that? Et cetera. And it's like, well, no, because it wasn't.
Like it didn't feel right in that conversation. It did feel right here, it there, et cetera. ⁓ So ⁓ that is kind of like a half answer to your question about tying all these things to metrics, making the ⁓ customer element there. it's really, it goes back to like hire the right people and then tell them that they can be human.
Matt Medeiros (09:23)
Yeah, when I got my tech career started at an internet service provider, an ISP, and I started off in, now this is obviously many, many, many, many years ago, this is when dial-up modems and T1 lines were a thing, I was helping, yeah, I was helping people like, okay, click on start, go to your modem settings, make sure, I used to know it, like the script off the back of my hand, but I don't remember it anymore, but it was just those, like, didn't even.
Phil Thompson (09:36)
I remember those days.
Matt Medeiros (09:50)
people didn't know what computers were back then. So it was kind of just like helping them, tell them like what this thing is in front of them. But then about, I don't know, six or seven years ago at this point, actually eight to nine years ago, I joined a company called Pagely. They were acquired by GoDaddy. ⁓ And I was an account executive there and I saw what it was like to do support. ⁓
or customer support, customer service for enterprise hosting and that kind of thing. And I always found this dynamic of high tier support with obviously your team, Pressable, and ⁓ other hosting providers that service a higher end type of customer. That comparison of here's the type of white glove support you're gonna get with a hosting company, and then by the way, your site that powers your business.
Yeah, it's using this plugin from this other team over here. And now, like when there's a problem, you kind of got to go talk to this person who knows very little about like great customer service or customer support. So I'm curious, like what that interaction is like for you as a leader of your team, like when a customer runs into an issue with a plugin they got from another developer, another provider, ⁓ maybe it's even commercial. They bought a license. They should be getting support.
from that other plugin provider. I'm wondering how you handle that dynamic, or maybe you don't even, maybe there isn't an issue, and maybe this is just a moot point, but ⁓ how you handle that dynamic when it's not Pressable's fault, it's not the customer's fault, it's this other plugin over here, and to what end do you go to maybe educate the customer to say, you kind of bought this thing that's causing the problem, you gotta go over there and talk to them about it.
Phil Thompson (11:44)
Yeah, for sure. That's actually a really tough one because, ⁓ you know, one of the, it's a burden and a curse, the openness of WordPress, right? ⁓ It's like, yeah, you can do anything, you can load anything in there, et cetera, but like, you can also, as a result, make your site go completely off the rails and like, it does not perform, it has security vulnerabilities, whatever, whatever. ⁓ Now, as you mentioned, like,
We can sit there and we can say, hey, here's the problem. It's with this plugin. You're going to have to go talk to that plugin developer. But if that plugin developer isn't providing any quality support, or in some cases, just no support at all, like, I've reached out to these guys eight times. I haven't heard anything, et cetera, it doesn't solve the problem that the customer's in, obviously. We can redirect them and tell them, hey, go over there.
they're not solving the problem, then it's not solved for the customer. And if it's not solved for the customer, they don't really care whose fault it is, you know, at the end of the day, they just care about the experience that they're, that they're caught in. And, ⁓ and so, you know, that stuff ultimately in a lot of cases is going to reflect on us as well. ⁓ you know, because the customer isn't going to have a delineation between the plugin developer who's a totally different company and their host is just like,
my site isn't working and I need it fixed. So it does it puts us in a bit of a bad situation. so the one answer for that is like, okay, well, like let's just go totally above and beyond and like fix this for the customer and away we go. And that's definitely an option. However, that option also doesn't scale.
You know, because then, you know, well, one, you got to figure out what's wrong with this plugin, figure out the code, figure out what's going on, you know, try and fix it, et cetera. ⁓ And then even if you can fix it, then well, what about the next round of updates of plugins or WordPress or whatever, then are we coming back and redoing that work again? ⁓ So it creates some pretty bad scaling problems. ⁓ And as much as
I would love to do everything for every customer just because then I know it's going to be done right and they're going to have a good experience. If we create scaling problems, like part of my job is, is, you know, having the, you know, forethought of like, if we create these scaling problems for ourselves, then our entire customer base is going to suffer because we're going to be more busy. We're going to be less available. ⁓ you know, one of the things that customers love with us right now is they just, you know, they click on the live chat window and we're there right away.
⁓ And that is not going to happen if we start taking on all of this extra, essentially professional services work, fixing other people's mistakes. the big thing that we try to do is first, let's see, is there anything we can do on our end to fix this or at least help mitigate the problem and ⁓ explore that first and certainly help like...
find and isolate the problem because that's honestly half the problem right there as most customers just don't even know where the problem is coming from. ⁓ then from there, if we can't fix things for them, then it's like, do as much as we can to empower that customer ⁓ and give them all the info. We'll even sometimes be like, hey, this is the message that you want to send to the plugin developer.
And like here, copy and paste this and tell them this, et cetera, et cetera. ⁓ Because a lot of times if they're reaching out, I don't want them to have to go through an entire cycle of basic troubleshooting with that plugin developer when they reach out. I'd rather they just be like, hey, listen, we found the problem. It's this line of code. ⁓ It's this, you your
passing a null variable in this array, and this is how we found that, and away we go. And then they can just pick up from there. So hopefully we can save them any extra work and downtime when they're relaying with that developer. And then also give them some other options, like, OK, hey, if that developer isn't responsive, then you would need to get this function rewritten. And we got some.
Thankfully, we have a pretty wide connection base in terms of agencies and of varying scales that we can refer folks to. ⁓ So if it's something very tiny, we have a few different companies that we can refer people to that are usually pretty cost effective for them. ⁓ So it's like, this is what you got to say to the developer, pass along this, et cetera, and this is what they need to do.
they're not responsive, another option is we know this agency, you can get a quote from them, et cetera, but really just empower them with as much information as we can. It's kind of like, ⁓ the same premise I would say is just generally applicable within customer support as well. You're never gonna make everybody happy, but the ultimate goal is just at least they feel one, heard and two, understood. ⁓ And then that,
Once we get to that place with them, they know like, we're on the same team for you. You know, we're fighting for you. ⁓ We'll do as much as we can.
Matt Medeiros (17:23)
You sort of ⁓ helped me segue right into one of my next questions, which was agency partnerships. This was huge when I was at ⁓ in the hosting world myself. We would, you know, I as an account executive, like selling into the corporate environment, I would say like we're, you know, we're not a tiered support system, you know, white glove support, et cetera, et cetera. I know that maybe this is more of like for like sales and partnership folks in the pressable organization to answer, but I'm just curious from the support perspective.
⁓ What is it like to interface with an agency? We have a lot of agencies and freelancers that are listening to this show and at the end of the day, they're all looking for new leads. They're all looking for ways to grow the agency and survive in this crazy time. So when you interface with an agency, ⁓ maybe with a customer or hand off a customer, what's some maybe advice or things that you, Pressable looks to?
to say, okay, this is an agency that fits our parameters for being a good partner agency. Is it actually like an official partner program they have to run through or can they apply, air quotes, like the person listening to this right now, could they apply to be on that list of well-known agencies? How does that work at Pressable?
Phil Thompson (18:40)
Yeah, so we basically audit ⁓ and do some validation steps to make sure that ⁓ folks are a good recommendation for us and also like the criteria that would really fit them. ⁓ But the automatic for agencies team, they handle all of that. ⁓ And through them, that's kind of the network that we'll use to toss customers out to.
based on, like I said, things like the customer's budget or even just the scope of the problem. That'll help our team in narrowing down which ones might be the best fit. And that's sourced based on a lot of input from the agencies themselves in terms of, listen, we don't really want a job that's going to be $1,500 and 45 minutes of work or something.
they'll kind of self-source some of that ⁓ in terms of their interest level for us. And then ⁓ we'll combine that just with also like our past experiences and also like other variables that we know about the job itself to kind of narrow down a list for the customer. ⁓ But yeah, we ⁓ refer them to ⁓ agencies through our Automatic for Agencies Network.
Matt Medeiros (19:59)
I want to talk about ⁓ AI and WordPress, but before we get to that, ⁓ is there anything at Pressable that you or with your team that you lead? Is there anything that you think people should know? Like it's not, it a feature? Is it that live chat? Is it like documentation? Like, is there something that you think, hey man, like this has to be known about Pressable ⁓ so that people can, you know, knock on our door and try out our stuff.
Phil Thompson (20:27)
Honestly, ⁓ mean, it's gonna sound kind of bland as an answer, but ⁓ I think the biggest thing for folks is just like, our secret sauce isn't really too much of a secret. Our secret sauce is just like, let's just nail the basics. So it's like, okay, have a good hosting infrastructure, make sure that it...
you know, it's fast, it's responsible, it's responsive, it's reliable, et cetera, ⁓ you know, provide good support and then listen to our customers. And maybe that last one is maybe kind of our secret sauce in that ⁓ I've worked for a lot of tech companies and you will know yourself like what the customer feature request pit hole looks like.
You know, you open the door to that room and it's just like this endless void with like a bunch of things in there. ⁓ and none of it ever gets touched or looked at, et cetera. And, I am very happy to say like, that's not the case with us. do a really, like, we definitely don't do everything. You know, customers will reach out and say like, Hey, it'd be nice if you have this, cetera. And while, you know, we get that that works.
and that's great and that would be awesome for that particular customer. ⁓ We do have to look at the totality of our customer base and what makes sense. So we will pick and choose, ⁓ but we actively and regularly churn through our customer-like feature requests. so I mentioned at the start, ⁓ I was here for a few years.
I left a foolish decision, but I left for a couple of years and then I came back. And one of the first things I said when I was coming back is, ⁓ know, are there any, I asked ⁓ the support team, ⁓ you know, across all the support team, is there any, you know, feature requests that we've been hearing a lot from our customers that we haven't implemented? And every single one of them said no. ⁓ And I was like, okay, they not asking for anything? And they're like, no, devs just built it.
⁓ And so they are constantly rolling out things, know, we'll toss something in there and then the support team forgets about it. And then, you know, like a couple of months later, somebody on dev will ping us and be like, hey support, you know, I got an MVP for this feature. Can you take a look at it? And we're like, yeah, we forgot we even asked about that. But maybe that's our secret sauce in that, you know, we get a lot of the features that customers ask for pushed out ⁓ and live. And it's not just like a
you know, self-fulfilling prophecy of a product team that comes up with like, we need this feature because whatever, market competitiveness, or we need this feature because I came up with it and I think it would be a good feature, whatever it may be. ⁓ We don't just blindly follow that as a roadmap. It's a lot of customer features.
Matt Medeiros (23:35)
All right, so let's talk AI and WordPress. I don't expect you to have all the answers for this final segment of the show here, but obviously AI is ⁓ obviously on everyone's top of mind. We don't even know where the world is going, let alone WordPress with AI. But ⁓ what we do know is, some experimentation ⁓ stuff with the AI make team from at wordpress.org. We are seeing
like WordPress.com has AI building features inside of it. can expect probably at WordPress.org, the open source version to have some stuff of AI coming into this. I try to like sit down and picture like what does WordPress even look like if it was like fully AI integrated. Let's say you logged into WordPress just like you might log into Cloud Code or ChatGPT or something like that and you can just start building whatever I want.
What does that mean for your team trying to support that? Like if somebody could just do anything with WordPress because of AI, how are you expected to support that in the future? Have you started to think down that path? Is there a directive for your team to start thinking like what happens in a world of AI when anybody can do anything with WordPress and suddenly like now you have to figure out what the end user did with AI and this.
Phil Thompson (25:01)
you
Matt Medeiros (25:01)
version of WordPress looks totally different? Like, what does that look like? How is that fear running through your veins right now ⁓ in that future world?
Phil Thompson (25:11)
Yeah, for sure. mean, from an individual site perspective, it's interesting because, yes, AI adds infinite possibilities into things. And as a site owner, you could create constantly re-optimizing pages that are just like
blowing through SEO based on, you know, tracking all of this data and then, you know, doing real time edits to pages and whatever it may be. ⁓ That being said, ⁓ in its current capacity, there's also a lot of room for things going off the rails. And when something goes off the rails, it can go very horribly, very quickly.
And so, mean, we, you know, internally ⁓ in Pressable, we use ⁓ a number of AI tools just like every other company these days. ⁓ But we have been very guarded on ⁓ using them in ⁓ customer facing support. ⁓ And we've actually just started trying this this year. And even then, it's it's we've kind of purposely handicapped it. ⁓ But
You know, in that, just to give you like an example of like going off the rails, ⁓ we do use it, ⁓ the ticketing platform that we use, they have their own AI agent and it's got like a co-pilot functionality. And so ⁓ one of our teammates, ⁓ she was just getting some validation around ⁓ some ⁓ short code structures for, I forget what it was, inserting, you know, ⁓
Vlog Vault or Vault Press hosted video ⁓ into a post or something like that. And then it came back with a like three page story on the origins of the Roman alphabet. ⁓ And it's just like, I'm sorry, what? ⁓ And you know, it's just like that.
Matt Medeiros (27:28)
To be fair,
sometimes writing short codes looks like that, so.
Phil Thompson (27:31)
That is true. That is true.
So yeah, I guess I should give it the benefit of a doubt. yeah, mean, it's just a great example of, and that's something that it's like, that's been trained on, like, our resources. Nowhere in our resources is the origin of the Roman alphabet. ⁓ So, you know, there's still a lot of room for things going totally off the rails. And that can be very egregious like that.
Or it could be really subtle. You start to get into a lot of these AI page builder functionalities and things like that. And it could cook up a page for you and it's like, yeah, the site looks great. ⁓ But then on closer inspection, you start picking through things and you're like, what? That doesn't make sense. Or where's that information from? And so that's one thing that worries me is a lot of people get themselves into an unknowing
⁓ you know, unknowingly in an, into a, a bad position where they have something that they, they don't really want. ⁓ but the, the upside, think for, ⁓ for site owners themselves is also really great in just like, even like troubleshooting your site. you know, so, most of the people that, ⁓ that have, ⁓ a WordPress site, I would say from my experience, they're not.
getting in there and stack tracing an error. ⁓ They have no idea what that means. They have no idea what that big blob on that white screen of death means and what is all of this, et cetera. ⁓ And having your site be able to analyze those things and spit out an intelligent result for you of like, hey, here's the problem. This is why this problem is happening, et cetera. ⁓ The quick fix.
disable that plugin, update it, blah, blah. ⁓ But also deeper troubleshooting, this variable ⁓ needs to be updated here. You can't call this fun, that function, whatever it may be. I think the troubleshooting tools that could be introduced with AI could be insanely valuable to site owners, especially the
the large segment of the WordPress population that isn't overly technical. You know, it's like they set it up using a, you know, a pre-install from the host, you know, and they just load in their theme, they load in their plugins, they use a page builder, et cetera. ⁓ You know, in those cases, like you're not necessarily dealing with somebody that who is incredibly technical, but that doesn't mean they still want to be, you know, left out in the river without a paddle when something goes wrong, right?
So I think the troubleshooting aspects of it definitely have a really big upside. I just kind of worry about the possibilities for lack of guardrails and hallucinations and things like that.
Matt Medeiros (30:38)
Yeah, I guess I hadn't thought of, I guess it's just me having been in customer support since the beginning. I always think of like that, what are they gonna do and how are they gonna break it kind of thing. But I never thought of it on that more positive side that maybe whatever integrated AI looks like for WordPress, like whatever that is in the future. ⁓
troubleshoot, like solving that issue and maybe even training and educating how WordPress was put together. And that actually might soften the blow on your team, like the impact of support time and all this other stuff, because now if somebody's got AI inside of WordPress, well, maybe it's actually debugging the fix for them to a degree, or at least pointing them in the right direction sooner rather than just immediately knocking on your live chat door.
using up your resources, et cetera. So that's definitely a positive take on it.
Phil Thompson (31:38)
For sure. And
even for plugin and theme developers themselves, I see upside for it. We'll see customers where we get them into chat and they're like, why is my site so slow? And we take a look and it's like, ⁓ well, your suite of Divi plugins are crippling the site because of all of these queries. And then it's like...
Matt Medeiros (31:43)
Sure, yeah.
Phil Thompson (32:05)
Well, I thought Divi was a good plugin and it's like, well, hey, stop. We're not saying it's not, you know, and it's, it's, you know, it's a matter of like, listen, it's, it's a good plugin. It works fine. have no problem with it running on our platform, ⁓ you know, but, you know, here the specific, you know, layout, the framework that you've built for the site is sending 2,700 queries per page load, you know, because you have, you know,
all this complex structure, et cetera. So even stuff like that, because you get a plugin like that, and then they go to the Divi team or whatever plugin and say, this plugin slowed down my site. Well, it's not the plugin itself. It's what you've done with it. So having tools where the site can retest and flag like,
hey, like you just added two and a half seconds to your page load time. You might want to undo what you just did. ⁓ know, stuff like that, know, stopping the customers from really, you know, tripping on their own feet. ⁓ I think that that's a win overall, like for all support within the WordPress industry, plugin themes, hosting as well. ⁓ So, you know, stuff like that would be great too.
Matt Medeiros (33:25)
Phil Thompson, Pressable, Pressable.com, one of our lovely pillar sponsors here at the WP Minute. Phil, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks? Is there a customer service splash page somewhere, or is it just Pressable.com?
Phil Thompson (33:39)
There isn't, ⁓ we should probably make that though. It would probably be filled with tacos internally. Tacos are like internal like kudos, like celebration methods. So there's a lot of taco emojis that get thrown around in the support team. ⁓ But yeah, pressable.com. You have any questions, ⁓ there's a little chat widget on every page. You can either reach out directly live chat to the sales team or the support team.
Matt Medeiros (33:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.