A new role, ad interim

For the next eight months, I’ll be stepping in as chief customer experience officer across Automattic. It’s a temporary role while Andrew, my direct lead, takes extended leave.

I’m excited about this opportunity. Support is the closest lens to how customers use our products. When something is slow, confusing, distracting, broken, support hears about it first.

My job for the coming eight months is to keep what Andrew has built running well. Within that, there are two areas I’ll lean into: a focus on more proactive support, and tightening the feedback loop. Both can grow faster because of AI, but let me start with the latter.

Tighten the feedback loop

In my chats with Beau, the head of product for Woo, we often discuss product and how support fits in. We both agree that the best products are those where people rarely feel the need to ask for help. The better our product, the better our customer experience.

With the help of AI, we’re able to close the gap between what we’re hearing as support and what the product is doing. An example of that is the bug blitz we did at Woo, where support engineers didn’t just report problems, but actually fixed them. This went so well that we extended our experiment across Automattic. Bugs were occasionally stuck in a queue for months, and now get addressed in days if not hours.

But it should not stop at fixing problems, any feedback that customers have or observations our team makes need to reach product soon. And not just where we drop it on the lap of engineers and product managers — a tendency I see in many other big tech companies — but where our support engineers have a seat at the table in deciding the direction.

An example of this collaborative motion is that our team built a tool that watches Woo’s code repo for releases and automatically updates all documentation affected by the latest release. The direction of communication is not just customer to support to product, it’s also product to customer.

Reach out proactively

Next, I want to continue our motion towards a more proactive communication with our customers. In our current support model, most of our work is reactive: we wait for customers to ask us questions and then we help them.

There are two main parts that allow us to change this: AI and better products.

Most of our AI assistants can now answer these questions of customers. Unlike many other companies, we deliberately put the customer experience at the center of our decisions. When we think about our AI tools, the first question is not “how can we reduce our workload?” but “does this create a better experience?” I’ve written more about that here.

As a result, the quality of our AI assistants is high. In more than 90% of the cases, the assistant answers the question of a customer. And we’ve only just started scratching the surface of a more agentic approach where AI doesn’t just answer questions, but actually does the work. I’m expecting that AI will take on more and more of this work.

Alongside AI helping customers directly, the better products I mentioned in the first section also just reduce the overall demand: customers have fewer questions for us. For example, in Woo, customers don’t have as many problems as before because our releases have gotten more stable.

The combination of better products and stronger reliance on AI solutions gives us more time to connect with customers who need it. With fewer reactive answers, and fewer questions in the first place, we’ll have more time on our hands to help customers through hiccups and milestones before they even realise they could do with help.

For example, for about a year now, we have started reaching out proactively to higher-end stores that have opted in to remote logging when we see a critical error on their site. In nearly all cases, this error is not caused by any of our products, but we care about our merchants’ success so we want to make sure these are fixed as soon as possible. We have also started offering onboarding calls on WordPress.com where we introduce new customers to their space on the web.

Partner with customers

I think this is just the beginning; I expect we’ll more and more become the partners people want and need to be successful online, not just the software they use. We’re well on the way of shaping what this looks like, and I expect we’ll see our direct relationships with customers grow.

If you notice anything across our products that doesn’t quite feel right from a customer point of view — friction, confusion, a tiny paper cut that adds up over time — I want to hear about it. Those details are how we get better.