How Do You Turn Hosting Customer Frustrations Into Delight?

Jesse Friedman continues his conversation with Aaron Campbell from hosting.com about transforming customer frustrations into delight. They explore building trust through transparent status pages, improving support communication with clear wait times, and aligning internal KPIs with actual customer success rather than efficiency metrics that game the system.

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

• (00:00) - How Do You Turn Hosting Customer Frustrations Into Delight?
• (00:31) - Introduction
• (01:09) - How do you build trust through reliable status pages?
• (06:02) - What are best practices for customer communications and support in hosting?
• (18:02) - How do you align KPI's to customer success in hosting?
• (23:16) - How can we learn from agencies in hosting?
• (27:07) - How should we be thinking about AI in hosting?
• (31:17) - Conclusion

Creators and Guests

Host

Jesse Friedman

Jesse Friedman is a long-time innovator, author, speaker, and currently, the Head of WP.Cloud and VP of Innovation and Partnership Success on Jetpack at Automattic. He is the author of Web Designers Guide to WordPress and a member of the New Riders, “Voices that Matter” series. A former professor, and long-term WordPress community contributor.

Guest

Aaron Campbell

Aaron is an international speaker, open source advocate, and outgoing introvert, currently working as the Director of Product Strategy at hosting.com. He has been helping hosting companies create, and bring to market, compelling and competitive product offerings for the last 10 years for brands such as GoDaddy, Newfold Digital, A2Hosting, and hosting.com. He’s been a regular contributor to the WordPress open source project for nearly two decades and applies his knowledge of, and passion for, open source to help hosts align with those projects to improve their own products and offerings while providing better and more secure open source solutions to their customers.

What is Impressive Hosting?

Impressive Hosting is a podcast that explores the core tenets of great WordPress hosting, from performance and security to scalability and user experience. Hosted by Jesse Friedman of WP Cloud, each episode features in-depth conversations with industry experts, developers, and hosting professionals who share insights, best practices, and real-world challenges. Whether you’re managing enterprise-level WordPress infrastructure, optimizing hosting for higher education, or scaling for high-traffic events, Impressive Hosting dives into the strategies and technologies that power the modern web.

Teaser
Aaron Campbell: I hope that hosting companies all over are listening to this right now and rushing to see if they can improve their chatbots.
Jesse Friedman: Let me ask you, are you the type of person that quickly starts packing up everything and running out the door, or are you waiting for the smell of smoke?
Aaron Campbell: Something so often overlooked is aligning KPIs, and I don't mean company-wide, I mean at every level with the success of your customers in the way that I was talking about.
Jesse Friedman: It's really remarkable when you can have those moments of delight for a partner or a customer.
Introduction
Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I'm your host, Jesse Friedman.
Before we dive in, remember to check out impressive.host. It's where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and submit questions for upcoming guests.
You also find all our links to follow, like and subscribe wherever you're listening. With me today is Aaron Campbell of hosting.com for part two. We were having such a great conversation about vulnerability and building trust with customers and aligning ourselves with the success of agencies and our customers as well. And man, we were just cruising—that first episode went right by.
Aaron Campbell: It went by so fast. Thank you for having me back.
How do you build trust through reliable status pages?
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, thank you Aaron. You know what's funny is I was actually a few minutes late to the last episode because I was dealing with a fire alarm in my office. And this tends to come up every once in a while—our producer John of the show knows this 'cause he's heard it in the background.
And so I was trying to deal with that and I realized I had a question for you because the last time the fire alarm went off, I just kind of ignored it and I sat there and the people I was meeting with were quite concerned for me. I tend to be one of those people who ignores it until it's an actual emergency. You and I travel a lot though, and I'm sure you've been to a hotel once or twice where the fire alarm has gone off. Let me ask you, are you the type of person that quickly starts packing up everything and running out the door, or are you waiting for the smell of smoke?
Aaron Campbell: I was in London just a few weeks ago speaking at the WP London Meetup. And in my hotel, the fire alarm went off and I walked over to the phone and I called the front desk. I said, "Is this real?" And the answer was no, so I hung up and I just waited until it shut off. So I have had enough false alarms that I do not quickly pack up.
And I kind of feel the direction you're headed here, Jesse, which is that those fire alarms, if they're not real when they're raised, we quickly lose trust in them, and that's where I'm at. If the room next to me was on fire, I'd be on the telephone checking to see if that was really the case, rather than out the door and safely down the stairs.
Jesse Friedman: That's exactly right. You nailed it because you were talking about in the last episode how you had status.hosting.com signaling to people about how things were going. The new branding had caused a couple hiccups and that's to be expected—it's a big project. But you know, your customers aren't going to be patient about that. They expect everything to be working and operational. So a status.hosting.com page can help to inform the customer and be clear about what's happening. And so you had mentioned that maybe that made some other people in the company a little nervous, like the salesperson who might be worried about the short-term repercussions.
But what we touched on there is that you are establishing trust. You're building a place for people to understand where they can go to get accurate information and understand exactly what's going on. And so that also allows them to feel comfortable putting some of their most expensive or highest-trafficked customer websites on your platform. And so I think that the status page has become far more common these days, but I'm interested to think about ways that we could use something like that to actually leverage a better message to customers, maybe as a marketing tool or even just improving customer service.
Aaron Campbell: That's a—so I think that the status page has become really standard. However, every company kind of runs that status page different. Some companies want to make sure that that always shows green all the time, right? And it doesn't matter the reality. If they have to put something on the status page, as soon as it's cleared up, that disappears like it never happened. And I think that that doesn't build the kind of trust that we ultimately want to build.
So I guess that finding the right balance on what hits that status page—if two customers out of hundreds of thousands are experiencing an issue, that's probably not something that we need everybody to be worried about, but at the same time, we want to be open about everything that really is an issue that could be affecting them.
I would love it—I guess kind of the simple way that I think about it is I would love it if anytime one of our customers has some sort of issue that they think might be Hosting.com's problem, you know, whether they can't access their site or they're trying to log in and it's giving them an error or whatever it is—if they check that page and there's nothing there, they know, "Hey, it's not Hosting.com's problem, it's actually mine." And I don't think that many hosts out there have that level of trust in the actual transparency of their status page. And so I think that that's one of those differences that ideally we will—
Again, we're playing the long game. We plan to be around for many, many—A2 Hosting is 21 years old as we do this rebrand to hosting.com. We plan to be around for a long time to come. And we want to build that trust knowing that that's going to be better for our customers in the future, which is going to be better for us bringing in more customers in the future. And we have to get a sales team that understands that vision and is on board with it for sure.
What are best practices for customer communications and support in hosting?
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that makes sense. It makes me think about ways in which the status of your platform could be utilized in other ways. Like that status page exists and it's a very technical page. So I don't think that it's made to be understood very quickly by even a novice, but I think the idea of going to that page is probably a little bit more advanced. I think that novice customers tend to show up at that when they Google something like "Is so-and-so down?" Then Google will push you to that and it shows you—
Aaron Campbell: Right.
Jesse Friedman: Which by the way, on your point before, if I get there and whether it's up or down, and it's green across the board, you know, either you are the greatest company of all time or something's a little fishy.
Aaron Campbell: Yeah, something's fishy always when I see all green all the time.
Jesse Friedman: Right, right. But you know, what'd be interesting is it would be a really bold and interesting statement to see a hosting company put that like in the top of their core website, like their front of their marketing page, like at the top right or something like that. To really just establish that level of trust right out of the gate.
Aaron Campbell: Yeah, that would be really interesting to bring that really front and center like that. We do in fact surface it in logged-in pages in our control panel, in those kinds of areas in the hosting control panel, in our WordPress control panel, because we do want to bring that kind of transparency to customers even if they're not finding that status page.
'Cause like you said, to me, the status page—it's important. It's important that it has the right info. I want to bring that info to our customers whenever we can, wherever they're at. But the main reason it continues to live off the site somewhere else is because if the absolute worst of the worst happened, and like all kinds of stuff around us went down, that lives on totally different infrastructure, you know, DNS, et cetera. So that could still be up, but bringing that to—
Jesse Friedman: Because what good is it if it's in your core infrastructure and something goes—
Aaron Campbell: Exactly. Hey, hosting.com is down. Check their status. Oh, that's down too. Right? That's not very useful. But bringing that to potential customers, to prospective customers on the site, pre-purchase—that's very interesting. That's something to really think about.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think it would definitely send a very strong message to customers arriving at the site that you believe in your infrastructure and you believe in good communication. For those of you thinking about this at home, if anybody ends up doing this on their hosting page, let me know 'cause I'd love to see it.
You know, what you mentioned is you weren't just using the status page to demonstrate how things were going with the actual platform, but you were actually talking about support queues. And I'll tell a story 'cause I was thinking about this myself the other day. My wife had to go to the emergency room and just spoiler alert, she's totally fine. Nothing to worry about, but she was having back spasms that were so severe that her legs were going numb.
So we said we had to go to the emergency room. It wasn't like she was bleeding from a wound or something that we had to just call 911. So we took the time to actually call some local ERs and see what their wait times were. And so we settled on a highly rated ER that we've been to many times before that said it was a two-hour wait. About what we expected. We got there and there's absolutely no information. There's no informational pieces. There's nothing that helps you understand where you are in the queue, how long it's gonna take. The people who are helping you by assessing you and everything else are behind bulletproof glass.
And they're not out there on the floor, they're not talking to you. And I'll tell you, we got there at 7:30 at night. Then it was 11:30 at night, then it was 2:30 in the morning. And this whole time we're thinking to ourselves, could we have a better experience if we went somewhere else? Could we be seen faster? And you get stuck and trapped because of the lack of information they're giving you, mixed with the fact that you don't know if you're going to get anything better anywhere else. So then if we were to depart at 12:30 in the morning and go somewhere else and start all over again, maybe our number gets called as we were walking out the door.
Aaron Campbell: Yeah. Am I now one hour away from being called, but it's a two-hour wait at the other place?
Jesse Friedman: Exactly right. And so that unknown becomes unbelievably frustrating. And I'll tell you something. We ended up staying—it took us till 4:30 in the morning, so that was like nine hours of sitting in chairs before we actually got back and were seen. And of course we're empathetic with the doctors. It's not the doctor's fault. They have an unbelievable number of patients. I didn't see one of them just sitting around reading a magazine. They're working hard. But it was the lack of communication with us that created a scenario where we said to ourselves the whole time, we are never coming back here. Like even if it's a life-or-death situation, we are re-routing that ambulance because it created such a frustrating memory for us, and it's now instilled in our brains. And so obviously far less emergency-related, but like when people care about their websites, they care about their customers being successful. Having clear communication around those wait queues can be so hugely helpful. And so I'm curious, like, how did that work out? Did you notice that it was like kind of auto-balancing because the live chat was shorter than the phone calls or whatever it might be, and all that? Or was it mostly just helping people feel at ease? Like how did it work out being transparent like that?
Aaron Campbell: You know, whether it auto-balanced or not, I'm not the right person. I wasn't keeping that close of an eye on every one of our queues. But setting that expectation is huge. And you got a two-hour wait expectation that is not a short wait, but that was fine because you knew what it was gonna be.
And the interesting thing actually, when I was at PressConf, I was talking to a number of people about their expectations for support responses, for chat, for phone, for ticket, and pretty much across the board—chat's an easy example. So some people said that their expectation for chat support is an instant response. They expect that when they kick off the chat, there's gonna be a person there immediately, all the way down to some people saying, "I would wait 10 minutes for someone on chat because I can be doing other stuff while I'm doing that. That doesn't bother me," which is admittedly a really great take.
If all of our customers had that, that would be fantastic. But the truth is a lot of times if there's a real problem and something's down, you are less patient than that. But every single one of those people, when they gave me the max time they would wait, I increased that time. I said, "Now what if you clicked the chat button?" And it said—for those immediate people, I said, "It said it's gonna be a three-minute wait. Would you be okay with that?" They're like, "Yeah, I could do three minutes." And for those people that said five minutes, I said, "What if you got on and it said it's a 10-minute wait?" They're like, "I could do that."
And setting that expectation really changed how long they were willing to wait and it didn't shorten the wait times. If support isn't working the way that you expect it to, that's just like any other part of our business not working the way you expect it to. But my hope is not necessarily that it auto-balances the queues, although that would be probably great for our people if it did. But my hope is that it makes the customers happier by giving them the kind of information that you were missing at the ER, by just telling them, "Hey, look."
You were saying in the case of a life-threatening ambulance thing coming in, you would maybe reroute. Well, the truth is, maybe they got in two loads of ambulances that came in the back door and people got pushed in front of you. If you'd have seen that somewhere, you'd have been like, "Oh, there was a car wreck and ambulances came in with injured people. Okay, we'll wait until those people are seen." But you didn't have that info at all. So I want to share that info.
Jesse Friedman: You know, I think what we're getting into here, which is something I've been contemplating a blog post about, is like the revisiting of delightful experiences. I remember years and years and years ago, we used to talk about this so heavily, that there were opportunities to delight in the way in which you built your products or launch your website, or even having little Easter eggs on your blog or whatever. So what you're doing is talking about taking a stressful situation and turning it into one where you can actually impress the customer. And that is gonna stick with them longer than anything else. And I think there's two things that really stick out in my mind when I'm trying to analyze whether or not I want to do phone support or live chat or whatever. I often immediately go back to the worst experiences I've had. So phone support—one of the more frustrating things for me is when you call, and it's the worst music you've ever heard. And it's like, I forget the term for it with audio, like it's compressed to the point where it's like crummy and it's elevator music.
Aaron Campbell: It's all compressed and clipping constantly, and yeah.
Jesse Friedman: And then it interrupts you and tells you, tries to sell you on something while you're waiting. And it's so funny to me because you are telling someone to wait during a stressful situation and annoying them to the point where—and I was in this ER and one of the most frustrating things about it was that there was this woman who was on the phone with her family talking at a volume that acted as if everyone in the room was in the conversation.
And so that little tiny thing just added a little bit of extra frustration to the experience. And so I often wonder why people who are designing these phone call waiting systems aren't employing some kind of stress-relieving situation—play ocean waves crashing on the beach or, you know, like give me a moment to like have a little meditative, like guided meditation. Like I'm joking around here, but at the same time, like, you know, there's an opportunity for improvement there.
And then the other thing too that is on the live chat—the thing that I go to immediately is, can I refresh the window? Can I walk away from this window? Can I, you know what I mean? Like, am I accidentally—am I gonna lose it? Because I'm off on another tab and it's not gonna ding me. Like what it should have for me is like a little, "Hey, we're gonna be with you in two minutes. Feel free to go browse the internet, do whatever you want. We'll ding you if you want to test the ding, here's a button. You know? Ding. Okay. You heard it." Like, these are things that would help me to feel confident in extending that wait time, and I think if you combine that with what you're talking about, you're really creating an experience where you're really delighting that customer.
Aaron Campbell: These are some great ideas. I hope that hosting companies all over are listening to this right now and rushing to see if they can improve their chatbots or their chat windows and such. But the other one that you didn't list that drives me crazy with chat support is when you've waited 10, 15 minutes and you have gotten distracted with another tab and you go, "Oh yeah, I gotta check in on that." You check in on it. They had answered, waited 60 seconds for you and went, "Well, since I'm not hearing from you, I'm closing this chat." And they're gone. It's like, I waited—I waited 15 minutes and you couldn't wait more than 60 seconds.
And so I think that even without some of the cool, impressive stuff that you're talking about—you know, hey, test the ding, which sounds fantastic to me—even just how you then process those chats. Do you give the person enough time to get back to you since you gave them enough time to get distracted away? And a lot of that is just how do you go about training your team and setting up the rules and the procedures to make sure that you're putting customer first. And that's sometimes a bummer because our support team needs to be able to handle as many customers as they can.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah.
How do you align KPIs to customer success in hosting?
Aaron Campbell: Sometimes that's saying, "Hey, I need you to hold off on this chat twice as long while they're not responding to you." That's not the best experience for our chat people, but that's the best experience for the customer, and that's where our focus needs to be. And we have to adapt our internal mechanisms to match that.
Jesse Friedman: I think that goes back to what we were talking about before with the host aligning itself with the success of the customer. Because those 60 seconds "I'm gonna wait" windows is probably because that customer support rep has a quota of how many tickets they have to get through that day, and how many, how fast are they closing them, all that stuff.
And so if they can game the system by getting out of that one as fast as possible because no one responded, that's one more chat in their queue. And so your goals around how many things can you answer gets morphed and mutated into how fast can they get out of this situation. Whereas if you're aligning yourselves with the customer and focusing on like NPS scores or other alignment scores, then you might have a higher likelihood of really being there for the customer.
Aaron Campbell: I think something so often overlooked is aligning KPIs, and I don't mean company-wide, I mean at every level with the success of your customers in the way that I was talking about. So for support folks, so often, you're right, like those KPIs are like number of tickets or whatever answered in X amount of time, but maybe what that KPI should be is some sort of balance of the NPS or the ratings that they get along with weighting the tickets that they actually had to respond on, or maybe it's back-and-forth responses in that amount of time, or like there are all these things and it makes it way more complex to figure out what that KPI should be. But I think that if you're not aligning that with the success of your customer, you are missing something valuable and you're teaching your employees and beyond that your company as a whole to accomplish this thing instead of your actual goal of customer success.
Jesse Friedman: Yeah. One of the things that we're excited about at WP Cloud is that because of the way that we're gonna market to hosting companies with the amount of work we do to manage the platform—keeping everything up-to-date, doing all this on behalf of the hosting company—plus, with our uptime scores, like we are eliminating so many of these support requests that are creating stress in people's lives when things are broken, when things are down, things like that. And I think it returns back to this idea that when you are functioning at your highest level and providing services at the level that you're able to, then you can redirect the attention of the same amount of people you have for support.
And the same amount of effort that they would be applying can now go towards their success rather than troubleshooting. So they're now freed up to spend less time on "my site's broken" or "my site's slow," and more time on "how do I set up a newsletter?" or "how do I become more successful?" And I think that's in alignment with what you're saying, with what your company's working on too as well.
You know, you create these understandings and the KPIs, and you do all these things to understand how you can better support your customers by keeping your ear to the ground and understanding exactly what they need. It's funny because you had mentioned in the last episode the differentiation that we need to make between novice and advanced customers. And we talked about how the novice customer wants some understanding of what it is that they're going to be able to accomplish and that their goal is actually going to be achieved, whereas a more advanced customer just wants to know where the button is that they need to press or something like that. And it got me thinking because you had mentioned that those novice users may not need to see multiple design patterns or options multiple times before they understand something or see design patterns or whatever.
It reminded me of my old agency days where the struggles that the agency was dealing with in managing the end customer's expectations—what we would do is we would design like three comps, right? And then we'd show them to the customer and let them choose because it made no sense to go down the path of fully building out a website before checking in with the customer and saying, "Are we on the right track? Is this what you like? Is this what you want to see?" We can talk and joke about how like everybody would always design three comps and you'd spend 90% of your time on the first one, 9% of your time on the second one and 1% of the time on the third one, and they'd always choose the third one.
Aaron Campbell: Yep.
Jesse Friedman: But you know, it's like when you think about working with agencies and aligning yourselves with them, you can also learn a lot about how they market and solve problems for their customers and then apply it to the needs of those novice customers.
How can we learn from agencies in hosting?
Jesse Friedman: That's a long way of saying like, as you know, the head of product strategy at hosting.com, are you keeping like a book of agencies or customers that you have your finger on the pulse of what they're going through, you're checking in with them, showing them new features. How does that work?
Aaron Campbell: A hundred percent am keeping a book of agencies and customers that I reach out to. I get feedback from, I talk to regularly. It's been fantastic over like the last year—Cory Miller came on board and has really been helping me do a lot of kind of interviews with all these agencies to get feedback and information and then from customers to get that information as well. And I think to your point, there is a ton that we can learn from agencies to solve things for those other customers. Like you were talking about giving three comps, having the customer choose one before proceeding on with any work on that.
We can do the same kind of thing for a customer that's just trying to add a contact page to their site. We can be like, "Hey, do you like contact page A, B, or C better?" And when they pick one, you can be like, "Okay, now you can customize this and adjust it and tweak it." Or, you know, "Now we can collect the contact info that we're gonna fill into it" or whatever that is.
But agencies are already doing that work for their customers. So we don't necessarily need to do that, but we need to support them in doing that. And that's a little bit, kind of one step removed, but making sure that we're giving them the tools to do that is another focus. You know, how do we make it so it's easy for them to take these three comps, show it to a potential customer, and then ignore the two that they didn't pick, and simply plow ahead with the other one with as little wasted time as possible. That's what we're constantly trying to gather from them. "Hey, can you just take us through a process with a new customer and let's just talk about how long each of these steps takes?" And when you see one that you're like, "Wow, that's a long time for that," let's see what we can do to help you do that faster, easier, more efficiently.
Jesse Friedman: Plus you get the added benefit that the agency feels heard. We actually just recently did this with WP Cloud. There was a feature that a partner of ours asked for and Barry, the head of systems, came into the conversation and it took a few moments of time for them to just describe what it was they wanted in this new feature. And while Barry's listening, he's writing in the background. He launched the thing moments later and deployed it as a beta test. And it not only impressed the customer and the partner and believing more in what WP Cloud can offer, but it really demonstrated that we're here for them the same way that you're talking about being there for agencies.
So it's—I think it's really remarkable when you can have those moments of delight for a partner or a customer.
Aaron Campbell: To be super clear, not everybody has a Barry with them. But also, I think that that basic point of not just getting feedback but actioning that feedback and getting back with the customer to let them know—now ours all happened in one immediate loop, which is fantastic. But then getting back to that customer to say, "Hey, we solicited info from you. We worked on that info, we accomplished the thing. Here, go use it." That loop really makes them feel heard, and that's important because we want to be listening to them. And the more they feel heard, the more they want to talk to us, which is great. It's like a little self-fulfilling, self-propelling circle there, which is fantastic.
But it's only if you do that action step. If you miss on that, you lose their trust instead of gaining it.