You Speak, We Listen: How Your Feedback Improves Your Customer Experience
Our customers are always our No. 1 priority here at WP Engine. Every decision we make is customer inspired, and customer feedback fuels our innovation.
To that end, WP Engine has a dedicated Customer Experience Operations team whose role is to ensure we continually improve the experience you have with our platform and services. This team is responsible for making process changes across the company, influencing product features based on your feedback, and advocating for our customers.
When you speak, we listen; and based on your feedback we have made several recent improvements to your Customer Experience.
Let’s take a look at some of these improvements:
Clearer Messages About Ticket Status
Previously, some messaging sent in response to opening a ticket, updating a ticket, or receiving an update to a ticket was confusing. Sometimes it was unclear what action, if any, you needed to take.
We have made many changes to our ticket status messaging to make it more clear what the next steps are and what action you need to take. We have also updated many workflows behind the scenes to ensure consistency with the topic of the ticket you have open.
We hope this will simplify the process of getting help from our 24/7 Support Team.
Plugin Timeout Extensions
Sometimes, a plugin requires more time to complete a certain job than our platform allows. Previously, when that happened, you would receive timeouts, which prevented those jobs from completing.
We understand how important these jobs are, and as a result, we will be extending the timeout threshold for several items (listed below):
- Gravity Forms imports and exports
- WooCommerce CSV imports and exports
- WP-All-Import imports and exports
Through our participation and communication within the community, we will continue to investigate which plugins are considered the most critical and we’ll ensure those plugins perform well on the WP Engine platform.
We hope that this allows you to run those critical jobs that your business relies on. Our goal as your preferred managed WordPress hosting platform is to empower your business to be successful on WordPress.
Plugin Security Update Notifications
One of the reasons you chose WP Engine as your WordPress platform is for peace of mind that comes with knowing your site is secured by experts.
In addition to our secure platform, our team has sent more than 30 notifications over the last three months to users of plugins for which important security updates were released. It’s vital that site owners keep plugins updated to ensure they are protected from published vulnerabilities, and we hope that by notifying you when we become aware of those vulnerabilities we enable you to take quick action to secure your site.
Those are just some of the most recent updates we’ve made to improve your experience on the WP Engine platform. We value your feedback, and we’ll continue to work to make sure your Customer Experience exceeds your expectations.
At WP Engine, we welcome customer feedback. If you have thoughts on how we can improve your Customer Experience, let us know in the comments.
Hi
First of all, I want to say that my starting point is that I’m a big fan. I have a 25 site Business Plan with you and have been really pleased with the way WPEngine works to date
But – I wanted to voice a couple of concerns – and I thought it’d be useful for you to see these from somoene who is essentially a really big fan – because actually you’ll probably get more lifetime value out of people like me evangelising about you than people who regularly moan. I’m not (honest) one of those.
Just to give you some context, my position is this: I am the founder of a tiny but growing digital agency. All our clients are museums – they’re not rich, but they’re nice people 🙂 We look after round about 50 client sites, with a package that includes retained time, maintenance and hosting. I have 25 sites with you, and the remainder on low-end shared hosting. And no, I can’t convince them to upgrade, before you ask – but I’m trying.
My particular worries are these:
1) I’ve hit the ceiling on our Business Plan hosting. I know this is due to convert to the Scale Plan shortly – but on the face of it I have very limited options available to me:
a) Move to a dedicated solution. Having talked to your sales guys, it turns out that this lands at about $8,400 p/a (he did do me a deal, but still it’d be $7,200) – and this is well over double what I pay now. Not feasible, at least not yet!
b) I was hoping I could just scale up by using the “per site” pricing model. But – and I’m really fed up about this – sorry, but I am – you guys charge an extra $20 per site per month but you don’t give any more bandwidth OR storage. This seems to me to be not only foolish (because it simply doesn’t let me SCALE which is the whole point!) but also a bit underhand. Sorry, yes, I did tweet it, but I feel quite strongly about this!
c) I could buy an additional Growth plan and run it alongside the Scale. This is ok, I suppose, but just seems messy and irritating, and inflexible. Also it means I’d be paying for 5 sites when really I just want to scale bit by bit..
2) I have only just now discovered that you are include staging and development site storage against our quota total! Given I’m already bursting at the seams (see #3) I’m pretty tense about this. Seriously, you didn’t mention this in any of the marketing that sold the “yay, up to 3 environments per site!” as a great thing….!
3) I’m bursting my bandwidth – it’s a specific site (freud.org.uk in case you’re interested – beautiful isn’t it…) – and although I think we’ve managed to nail down the issue (it’s legacy requests for an old feed address which is really panning the site) it has taken ages, and the dashboard *still* shows this as an overage. So every time I login I’m told that I owe money, and it’s all just a bit crappy..
The problem I basically have is that I really want to grow with a company that I trust – and I have come to trust you, in particular your amazing support – but I simply don’t see how I can grow, apart from forking out $7k a year which I just don’t think is feasible. Really I wish you guys had either another tier on offer between “quite big” [Business Plan] and “enormous” [Dedicated] OR that the “scale” thing of buying another site really *was* a thing that scaled. But it doesn’t look like it is.
The upshot is I seem to now be looking at Kinsta or Flywheel or another host – and I genuinely, really don’t want to be doing this.
I’m not expecting you to give me an answer that ticks all my boxes. I understand that you’re constrained, and probably just think “dude, just pony up for the bigger package and leave us alone” but I thought if you genuinely want to get user feedback then, hey, here it is.
thanks for giving me the time
Mike Ellis
Thirty8 Digital
Hi Mike,
Thank you for your feedback and we are eager to address your frustrations. I’ve notified the team and someone from our Account Management team will be in touch shortly.
Hi
Thanks. No-one ever did. I also asked whether the comment could be made private?
thanks
Mike
Hi, you know what would make WPEngine the most amazing host ever? If adding plugins/plugin updates were committed to git and you could then pull those changes to your local repo (the same way it happens for auto wordpress updates).
Hey Dave. I work for WPE. That’s a great suggestion. Thanks!
I’ll make sure I flag this suggestion with our engineering team. In the meantime, I believe you can do what you’re trying to accomplish with https://wppusher.com/. Check it out 🙂
Also, this isn’t the exact same thing, but you may also find interest in our new Smart Plugin Manager product as well… https://wpengine.com/smart-plugin-manager/