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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from Matt's discussion with Metodi Drenovski, the founder and CEO of Jethost, a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. Metodi by to talk about JetHost's role in the hosting landscape, the challenges of using AI and customer support, and what agencies need from their web host.
You'll also find helpful tidbits on WooCommerce versus Shopify and AI site builders. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Matt Medeiros (00:41)
Like everyone's adopting some form of automate. I say everyone, but you'll correct me. Everyone's adopting AI and like not even AI, but like automated response chat bots like the the machine learning ones. just say, if you typed in this keyword.
it's going to just spit you these three documents or whatever. How do you try to get the human in the loop as fast as possible so that the customer will get the support that they're looking for?
Metodi Drenovski (01:08)
⁓ First, the foundation of our team is built entirely from people that have, we all have more than 20 years experience in web hosting and in fact also in web development and in hardcore programming. In fact, before I started ⁓ being in the hosting business, we were really a hardcore programmer, Java enterprise and things like this.
⁓ So ⁓ we have some very fundamental knowledge about how the technology is working. during the years we start to understand better how to understand better customer and translate this technology understanding into ⁓ helping customers. And then we start to build a very, ⁓ how can I say, process that we enter person.
into our team. So yes, we are using AI because the technology is changing very fast, but we have a very, very big foundation of knowledge that we are putting in an AI so we can easily onboard new customers, new ⁓ people in the support team. We don't expect the AI to solve a customer problem because
Usually he will say do this, this, this, and this and the customer might not understand. Sometimes we need to do this for them. In the moment, is ⁓ dangerous to say that the AI, okay, ⁓ delete his files and create them a new one or to give whatever read, read, write access. Read, yes, but write access is dangerous to give to a production environment. There are cases where it appears to do some.
things not as expected. So ⁓ we are working on the foundation that we have ⁓ as a knowledge and put it in the AI so it will be easily accessible to the new people that are onboarding in our environment and telling them how to work. And everybody who is coming in the team is working with some senior staff that is helping him to understand better what the process and how to work better.
from our perspective of course.
Matt Medeiros (03:33)
Yeah.
Yeah. One of the biggest challenges that I found, and I think anyone who sells WordPress services or WordPress hosting is again, same thing, going back to that same customer that couldn't see F5 to refresh the page. They also don't understand like when I hit limitations with WordPress, that could be ⁓ bandwidth, it could be ⁓
It's been a while since I've been in hosting, but I'll say PHP workers, could be CPU, could be memory. Customers don't realize like, okay, my site's growing, I'm adding more content, I'm doing more with my business. What do you mean like I'm running out of memory? Or what do you mean the site is running slow because I'm on an entry level plan and now I have to go up? mean, Jet Host has a range of products, which we could talk about. I you're doing WordPress hosting, of course, you're doing WooCommerce. How do you help?
the customer understand, okay, you started out on a value plan, but now it's time to upgrade. It's time that you just need more resources, your business is growing. How do you smooth that part over? Because I always find that to be the challenging part in hosting is to get the customer to jump from one plan to the next, because they just simply don't understand what's happening behind the scenes.
Metodi Drenovski (04:51)
There is no straight way formula that can describe how this is going to do. ⁓ The first thing is that if a customer is making money from his website, he understands that if it is ⁓ one of the examples that we use, in fact, is like a store. If you have a small store in a shopping mall and you are running a big advertisement, the customers cannot enter into the shop.
Either you have to stop the advertisement or there will be a big queue waiting to enter into the shop and might be that your working time will end and you will close the shop and some of these customers will not be able to buy anything. Or you have to rent a bigger shop and all the customers will enter. Yes, you will have more sales, but you need a bigger shop. Physical shop is the same when you are online. You need a bigger space for your website.
to work properly and to be able to handle every person that is coming. For more technical people, sometimes it's more easy. In fact, yesterday I was on an event speaking with a customer when we say about PHP. He was showing me his e-commerce website and he tried to look in and it gives internal server around saying, look, you have a problem where you are hosted. You have a problem with the PHP max execution time. And he was, ah, what is this? And I say, okay, I can help you.
Not exactly here in the moment, but when we see the problem, we know how to identify it. When you have to tell him if you are on a plan that needs more PHP workers or PHP execution time, we don't exactly use this. But we say that you need more space because it's like a real shop. Or if you have a restaurant, we try to frame it with how the customers, what is the customer of the business.
what is the business of the customer so he can better understand us because if we talk with ⁓ technical jargon we lose him.