WordPress.com Did WHAT?? Customer Service Update  - Three months ago, I ran a secret shopper project to compare the customer service at the top managed WordPress hosts, and the results were all over the place. There were clear winners and losers, but what I didn't expect is how receptive the hosts would be to the feedback. So in this video, I'll show you which hosts have taken the feedback to heart and which hosts have unfortunately not shown any visible improvement. In my original video, I hired a virtual assistant to run the same six test scenarios at Kinsta, Hostinger, InMotion, Rocket.net, WP Engine, wordpress.com, and BigScoots. You can watch the original video to learn more about each test, but the results were as follows. BigScoots came in first place and Rocket.net was a close second. Kinsta and Hostinger did well, though not well enough to stand out from the crowd. It wasn't bad by any means, just nothing special. InMotion struggled with communication around the migration process, and their support was generally a bit technical for our VA. WP Engine and wordpress.com are where things went off the rails. WP Engine uses an AI chatbot that's so aggressive it was telling our tester to log into phpMyAdmin and make database changes generated by the AI. And wordpress.com, unfortunately, had a critical service failure. Not only insisting its AI chatbot could help when it actually couldn't, but also by failing to reply to a critical site lockout ticket for several days. Our account was seemingly stuck in a loop where there was no acknowledgement that the ticket was escalated to a human, but trying to reach out via the AI chatbot resulted in no reply, possibly because the ticket was escalated to a human. We also tried emailing [email protected], figuring we could submit a ticket that way, but there was no autoresponder, and no reply came. After several days, we had to cut our losses and create a new wordpress.com account to continue with the rest of our tests. I did reach out to wordpress.com as a courtesy to let them know what happened, but that did not influence the way I ranked them in the video. I mean, they came in last place. So I released the video during WordCamp US in August, and the response was incredible. Every single host featured in the video reached out to have a conversation about their results and ways they could improve their service. And while every host had a comprehensive debrief on ways they could improve their service, one host in particular really took this feedback to heart, wordpress.com. (group cheering) (static beeps) I quickly want to disclose that this video is not sponsored by wordpress.com. It's not sponsored by anyone. Though I have an ongoing engagement with wordpress.com, they did not ask me to make this video, and they are not getting to see it before it's released. I'm just legitimately blown away by all the ways wordpress.com has improved the experience in a matter of weeks. And yes, it was just a couple weeks. I'm actually late to the party making this video. So with that being said, let's run through the changes they made. First, they've tuned their AI chatbot to escalate critical issues to a human immediately. Our site error site won't load message that our tester used would now be sent directly to a human without the AI chatbot intervening. Next, they fixed a technical glitch that broke the handoff between the AI and human support. It looks like a request may have not made it to a human, so they fine tuned this to be fault tolerant if your connection drops, even saving your last message in your browser and redelivering it when your connection comes back online. Perhaps the most impressive change is wordpress.com's decision to eliminate support blackouts. Our tester reached out during a 24-hour period where the live chat was closed for a company event, but wordpress.com has changed their policy to ensure that live chat is always available every day of the year. They've also expanded their time zone coverage to provide broader, more consistent coverage around the clock. One piece of feedback I brought up privately was the fact that there wasn't much communication about where the user was in the support flow. Was the request escalated to a human? How long is the wait? Will I get an email follow up if I close my browser tab? Wordpress.com has fixed this, and you'll now get clear communication on where you are in the support process. Now, I also mentioned that we got no response when we emailed [email protected]. Not even an acknowledgement that a ticket was opened. Wordpress.com took this to heart and added an immediate auto response, confirming they've received your email. They even went above and beyond to listen to my feedback on migrations. I let them know that I really appreciate BigScoots' clear, rich communication process throughout the entire migration experience. Wordpress.com has added more communication to migrations to inform you of the full process, including a security review and quality review before your site goes live. Look, I'll be honest, this is the most impressive response I have ever received to feedback I've given in a video. I'm legitimately blown away by how committed wordpress.com is to taking customer feedback to heart and improving their product. I have never seen this before in my 14 years of making YouTube content. While every host took the time to hear my concerns and feedback on our experience, no other host has given me consistent updates on things they've implemented. That's not to say they ignored the feedback, but they certainly haven't been proactive about communicating updates. Although I do need to give an honorable mention to Hostinger, they let me know after I released the video that their AI chatbot had already been updated to fix some of the concerns I mentioned. Mainly the fact that their AI chatbot was heavy on expecting the user to take the action, but now, they've updated it so the AI can make changes on the user's behalf. And they were already implementing these changes before the video was released, but they didn't start making the changes until after our testing was complete. There was about a month window of time between when the testing wrapped up and the video was released. But as for wordpress.com, I have a new respect for their product and team after releasing this video, and I learned a lot from the experience. There's also ways I want to improve the next iteration of my customer service comparison based on feedback that I received. The most common concern I saw was that the video was sponsored by BigScoots and it looks a bit suspicious that they won. I can assure you, BigScoots had no idea what the tests were, when they were being performed, and which account was being used. In fact, after the video went live, their team asked if I could finally share the account with them so they could investigate exactly what their responses looked like because they legitimately had no idea. They tried to figure it out even after the video dropped and they were clueless. Every host was blindsided. For transparency, we gave every host access to the test accounts after the video was released so they could do their own investigations. We also hired a virtual assistant to remain as unbiased as possible, and we factored their personal experience into the results to make sure the winner was easy to work with even from our tester's perspective. Despite this, I understand that BigScoots sponsoring the video could be taken as a conflict of interest. And to be totally transparent, we could not have done this video without them. They took a risk. We pitched them this grand idea and said, "Hey, you're telling us that your customer support is the best in the industry. How about you put your money where your mouth is? You sponsor this video so we can fund it. We can hire a VA, we can do all this testing, and you're not going to get to see the video before it goes out. You don't know who we're comparing you against, you don't know what the tests are, when we're doing it, which account, and if you lose, you just paid to sponsor a video that you lost." And they were bold enough to say, "You know what? We believe in our product, we'll do it, we'll take the risk." So it was kind of this mutual shared risk where they went out on a limb and we went out on a limb as well. I was concerned that it would be taken as a conflict of interest, but I was very clear with them that they had no editorial control over the outcome. But after seeing the incredible response from the video, we're changing the model going forward. We're going to try having every web host pay an equal entry fee to be included. That way there's no concern of bias. I think the entry fee model is fair for everyone involved, and it also may change the dynamic of which hosts are included. See, this time we picked hosts based on who we thought were the most popular players in the managed space. But I get it, it's highly subjective. With the entry fee model, hosts will only enter if they're confident in the quality of their support, so a new winner may emerge. Now, we also got some great feedback from Kevin Ohashi. Kevin is the founder of Review Signal, and his WordPress hosting performance benchmarks are the industry standard for unbiased performance data. So when Kevin reached out with his thoughts, I was eager to hear his feedback. He pointed out how the results were seemingly based on vibes, and there didn't seem to be objective criteria judging the outcome. And after rewatching the video, I totally agree. We could have had a more objective scoring system without it being 100% opinionated. Now, I will say that I always want my content to be editorial to some degree. I'm never just going to show a spreadsheet and read out numbers without giving my opinion. However, I acknowledge that I could be a bit more objective and demystify things next time. I like the idea of having a scoring system with a scale from one to five in various categories, so that way it could be maybe response time, response quality, migration experience, different categories like that. And finally, we want to standardize the testing process even more next time to eliminate as many variables as possible. This time around, our tester completed the same tests at each host, but they didn't use identical language. They typed their requests in their own words each time. Next time, we want to pre-write the copy and have our tester paste it into the opening ticket or chat at each host to ensure that every host gets a 100% fair and equal opportunity at understanding the issue. My biggest takeaway from this experience is that the WordPress community cares about feedback. I love how this video pushed the entire industry to do better. Wordpress.com is raising the bar, and this is only going to put pressure on competitors to improve their support as well. At the end of the day, that's the best possible outcome I could hope for. If you want to check out wordpress.com, I've got it linked below, including a special discount. And if you want to see how the rest of the host performed in the comparison, you can watch the video here., WordPress.com Did WHAT?? Customer Service Update, YouTube, 01kb10c06jscc31esfqvpc51en.