Shopping for WordPress hosting? How can you tell your host has amazing support or not?

Web hosting is a crowded marketplace. When you’re shopping for a new WordPress host and type “WordPress hosting” into Google, you’re inundated with a dozen results from companies who all claim to be fast, and secure, and provide amazing support.

But how do you know that a hosting company actually provides the best possible support? When everyone claims to be great, how can you tell the difference between marketing and reality?

There are three key areas you can use to to evaluate a company’s support (and overall customer experience):

1. The company promotes its support as a feature
2. What Blog Reviews, and Social Media interactions tell you
3. The Actual Experience you (and others) have with the company

From Day One, WP Engine has been committed to providing stellar customer support to each of our customers. In the next series of blog posts, we’ll cover what amazing support means, and what it looks like. We’ll include customer stories where our support team has worked closely with the customer to dig in and troubleshoot technical issues with our customers.

But let’s say you’re searching for new hosting. Here’s how you can tell a company has amazing support from start to finish.

The company promotes support as a feature

How does the company position their support in their marketing?

Look for truth in advertising.

The first indicator of how much faith a company places in their support is how much they promote it as a benefit. Customers can rest easy when a large group of WordPress experts – who know how to solve the tough problems – are answering support tickets. Look for specific information about the number of support staff they hire per customer, and the sorts of qualifications they require support staff meet.

Are they hiring experts, or are they hiring the first person who responds to their craigslist posting? Do they have enough people to service all their customers, or are they running a skeleton crew?

If the company is proud of their support, they’ll tell you exactly why.

What blog reviews and social media interactions tell you

How does the company engage customers on social media?

The moment you begin doing research on a company, is the moment their customer experience begins.

Every time you see a brand interacting with a customer on social media, you can learn a bit about what it’s like to do business with the brand. Companies that work hard on their social presence are the exception, not the rule. So if a company is active on social, chances are they pay attention to the details.

For example, can you ask a sales question about the company on Twitter and have them respond quickly with an answer?

Also look for how many problems people tweet with a customer issue, and then notice how quickly the company responds with help. Do they respond at all? How quickly does a response come through? Everybody has support issues, and the larger a company, the more customers there are to ask about a support issue. The key is the priority the company places on social.

Search Twitter to see what other people think

Power to the people.

Marketers are infamous for wanting to control the reputation of their company in public. However, social media means that customers now have the power to broadcast their real experiences with a company as they happen. Doing a simple search on Twitter for tweets containing the company’s Twitter handle or their name will tell you exactly what real customers are saying.

Are people talking about the company at all? The more mentions of a company in a week, the larger their customer base probably is. Simply looking at volume of social media response is a quick way to find the market leader.

The difference is perfectly illustrated when you compare Virgin America (@VirginAmerica) to United Airlines (@United). People spontaneously tweet awesome things about Virgin, and Virgin responds to them! All you’ll see about United is how much pain people go through when they fly the airline.

Social media makes it clear which company makes people smile, and which people makes people wish for a refund. A company’s silence on social media speaks volumes.

Are there blog posts reviewing how great the company’s support is?

Google for “reviews” of the company to see what people are writing about. Particularly in a new industry, bloggers will write about their first experiences with a company that is leading the way in a new market.

Word to the wise: For web hosting, there are plenty of sites that will put affiliate links in these posts. Most bloggers in the WordPress Community won’t actively be affiliates for a product they don’t use and love themselves. The best sales force is a legion of happy customers.

The Actual Experience you (and others) have with the company

Are their staff friendly and personable when they work with you?

Support the customer’s experience.

It’s no secret that when customers call in with a support issue, they may already be pretty frustrated. It takes a skilled support tech to first, let the customer feel heard, vent if they need to, and then second, solve the tech problem. Sometimes before an issue gets solved, people just need to feel like the company has heard their frustrations.

For example, when Apple interviews support staff, they run through a series of scenarios of customers who have a broken iPhone to evaluate how much empathy the tech responds naturally has. In one scenario, someone has tripped over their dog and cracked their iPhone screen. Support techs who ask whether the person and their dog are OK before moving on to the broken phone move on to the next round of interviews. Those are the techs who will leave Apple customers feeling cared for.

How quickly do you get most questions answered?

The faster the better.

Obviously, some issues are more involved than others, but how quickly you get a response and a resolution matters. The faster you can get your issues taken care of, the faster you can get back to the rest of your life. If getting answers takes hours or days on a regular basis, chances are, support may not be a huge priority for the company.

Customer happiness, WP Engine’s most important metric, is directly related to how quickly we can respond to a ticket, and we have high goals for not only a first response time, but also a first resolution time for every ticket. But you might ask what we do about the more complicated tickets? That answer is in the next section.

Is support resourceful when their knowledge runs out?

The best WordPress support folks are experts at WordPress and hosting. They’re intimately familiar with plugins and themes, and know how to debug code. But even the smartest engineers hit roadblocks. The test of a truly great support tech is how resourceful they are at not only solving the problem technically, but also keeping your satisfaction high for until the moment your issue is resolved.

Do support techs display ownership?

Are techs quick to pass the buck and say, “not my problem,” or “that’s not in our SLA”? Or do they seem to relish a challenging problem, and refuse to walk away until they’ve worked out what was going on, solved it, and then explained it to you. Stubbornness is a personality trait of the best sorts of support folks. They’re stubborn about solving problems. They don’t understand how to walk away from a problem sometimes. That’s the sort of person you want fixing your issues!

Does the company also put the development team on support duty?

Engineers are one of a company’s most valuable resource. When a company makes time in their schedule to work on support tickets, this signals how valuable support is for the organization. First, you know that the engineering team is going to be able to solve tickets quickly, and provide thorough explanations about why a problem occurred.

There’s a second benefit that by working directly with customers, the engineering team stays connected to the people who are using the product. Nothing can replace real customer feedback when it comes to building great software.

When everything goes wrong, how does the company recover?

Things aren’t always going to go smoothly. The mark of a great support experience isn’t that everything always goes flawlessly, it’s how gracefully the company responds to problem. A company that provides great support accepts responsibility and recovers well from a mistake that they made.

Do the support reps resist, or do they accept responsibility and work to make things right? Do they go out of their way to patch things up, and even refund money cheerfully when necessary? Do they respectfully and genuinely apologize for your frustration, and work to make things better?

Do support reps also insist that customers be respectful with with them?

Before a support issue has been satisfactorily resolved, tensions can run high. Rightly so. The site in question may be the customer’s primary source of income, or a blog they’ve spent years on. They should have strong feelings about their hard work!

A great support tech knows how to stay cool in these situations. They remain calm and respectful, allowing the customer to express themselves completely, but politely. It’s the support tech’s job to hold a firm boundary of mutual respect in the interaction, and to politely but clearly insist that the customer treat them with equal respect. After all, great support is a two-way street!

Is the company transparent with you?

Finally, a clear and transparent processes means you’re never left guessing what went wrong. The techs let you know what’s going on with your site so you don’t have to guess. When you ask questions, they provide clear and detailed answers. If they’re going to make a change, they ask your permission, and explain why the change needs to be made.

Transparency means that when things go awry, you’ll be notified as well. Transparency is key to building trust between customer and company, and you can see it everywhere from early support interactions to support blog notifications.

Support is part of the Customer Experience

When our support team talks about their work, they talk about it in terms of creating an overall positive customer experience. An amazing customer experience is the result of how a company interacts with customers, from product quality, to features, to support. The customer experience starts when you begin researching a company, and lasts for as long as you are a customer.

And since web hosting is one of those things you want to sign up once for and then forget about, this list should help you make the right decision for your WordPress sites when you’re ready to sign up for a new host.

WP Engine is committed to building the best possible customer experience with our support team, from start to finish. And if you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you, as always.