Winning Two Stevie Awards for Customer Service and The Hard Work Behind It

Client Ratings And Easy Escalation Path

Staying on top and maintaining a high level of service requires the introduction of checks and balances. We found that client ratings are an extremely good indicator of performance. That is why we ask clients to rate their interactions with our agents and we monitor the individual ratings of all team members. Poor client ratings are a red flag urging their direct supervisor to take action.

At the same time, we have an easy escalation path that in addition to being very convenient for clients, also acts as an alert when things go south. Clients can escalate their case to a supervisor and make sure that whatever issues they had with the case resolution, get noticed and eliminated in a timely manner.

Thanks to these two mechanisms and the willingness of the agents to learn and improve, in the past year we also helped over 1.1 million clients on live chat. Most of those were rated by the client parties afterward, and 98% of the rated were marked as “Extremely helpful.”

Optimizing Customer Service Channels

No matter how well-prepared а team is, there always comes a moment when you have to stop and think – are we doing the best we can? Dealing with the winter flu season, for example, when we encourage people to stay home and rest, it becomes twice as difficult to process all the incoming client inquiries. So we figured it’s not only about hiring more people to process more inquiries. Over the past few years SiteGround more than doubled its client base, which made optimizing our customer services a top priority. 

We enhanced our customer support experience by introducing automatic recommendations of the fastest and most relevant channel for each specific request. Our in-house AI-powered system reviews incoming inquiries and depending on the type of issue and on the current load on all our customer service channels, it recommends the one that will be most efficient (lowest wait time combined with the skill level to resolve the issue in question). 

We developed a custom Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chat Bot and AI search tool to assist clients right away reducing wait time. That’s not one of those funny moments when you chat with a machine like in the movies, it’s a real-time educated software that tries to match your inquiry to previous conversations and if the issue has been addressed in the past, it will suggest a solution right away, without sending you to an agent. Of course, if the suggested solution is not useful, you get in touch with a member of the team. That’s how we keep our average wait time on the phone lines at 2 minutes, and our HelpDesk tickets are resolved in 15 mins. on average, with the majority of issues resolved with our first response.

Tuning in to What Our Clients Say Year after Year

And last but not least, besides relying on the external evaluation of prestigious third-party institutions such as the Stevie Awards, we ask our clients every year how they rate our support and other parts of our service. That is how we know we are still on the right track. Over the last years, we have been receiving consistent 98% customer satisfaction scores in our annual client surveys, which makes all that hard work we do worthwhile. 

We also closely monitor our Net promoter score (NPS), based on how likely our clients are to recommend us. NPS is a complexly-calculated value between -100 and 100. Scores higher than 0 are typically considered to be good and scores above 50 are considered to be excellent. SiteGround’s NPS is 62. To put that in context, companies with the same NPS as SiteGround in different industries include Apple Cloud Storage, Sony, Trader Joe’s, Zoom communications, and more, so we’re in excellent company! 

For us, optimizing our customer experience is a never-ending process, and we are committed to going above and beyond, thanks to the extreme dedication of our team and the priceless support of our loyal clients.