Human Care + AI Efficiency: Enhancing The Quality of SiteGround Customer Service

You either love or hate AI by now. Most of us are stoked by its capacity to resolve problems and cut our workload. Yet, we often hate it when we need actual assistance from an empathetic human being, but instead we are stuck with… a chat bot. 

For us at SiteGround, adopting AI in our Customer service is an exciting and ongoing journey that started back in 2017 and evolves with the natural evolution of AI itself. 

Our team loves AI and is convinced in its capacity to efficiently resolve complex challenges of all sorts. It already hugely contributes to improving our customers’ experience in many different ways and we are about to share with you how we have integrated it so far and some of the exciting new applications we’ve initiated. In case you, as a customer, have not yet experienced any of those, we would love you to give it a try and see for yourself. 

At the same time, despite all our passion for AI, we believe that for more years to come the true value of any service business like ours will be defined by the expertise and experience of the humans behind it. That is why, as much as we invest in AI integrations, we also invest in growing the expertise and capacity of our Customer service team. 

Our philosophy is that smart AI applications paired with human support is the key to maximizing customer care quality. By letting AI handle routine tasks and allowing human agents to focus on complex issues, we’ve elevated our service efficiency while maintaining the personal touch.

Pioneering AI at SiteGround

Our adventure with AI began back in 2017, when we introduced our groundbreaking AI-powered anti-bot system — the first of its kind in our industry! Today, this very system blocks a whopping 95% of malicious traffic before it even reaches our customers’ sites. Fast forward to 2019, when we integrated custom AI-powered real-time translation into our customer care systems, enabling us to serve clients in multiple languages and scale like never before. These early AI innovations worked their magic behind the scenes, dramatically boosting customer experience without direct interaction from clients.

With AI technology advancing at lightning speed, we took a bolder step into client-facing AI integration with the launch of our AI HelpDesk Assistant in 2023. It is designed to slash support response times for our most common inquiries, providing direct responses and how-to instructions from our extensive internal documentation, Knowledge Base and Tutorials. The results? Our instant AI Assistant nails the correct answer in 96% of responses, with 85% meeting our rather high customer service standards. Naturally, we couldn’t wait to build on that and take our AI applications to new heights!

Exciting Agentic AI Applications at SiteGround

In 2025, we added a brand new task-focused element to our AI assistant in our website control panel, Site Tools. On a daily basis, our clients perform a variety of website management tasks, some of which we’ve trained our AI assistant on. Now it analyzes our users’ intent in Site Tools and suggests performing certain actions on your behalf. 

If, for example, you’re looking to clear the cache on your website, you can ask our AI assistant in Site Tools to help you do that. It will describe the steps you need to follow in detail, but will also conveniently suggest doing it for you. Just a simple confirmation on your part, and voilà! The task is completed in seconds, with a confirmation to boot!

At this stage, our AI task-oriented agent handles only carefully curated low-risk operations like website cache purge, country blocking, enabling CDN services, fixing WordPress permissions, checking SSL validity, and resetting DNS SPF records. Since these are all website-specific, it works only when engaged in SiteTools. But we’re already working on expanding its capabilities to tackle more tasks, including backup restores, and integrating AI agents into other areas like the SiteGround Customer Area, Email Marketing, and Website Builder interfaces.

Enhanced Efficiency

The biggest strength of our AI technology lies in its ability to tackle repetitive tasks and massive inquiries with speed and precision. Our AI-powered systems swiftly process and respond to customer queries, cutting response times even further and boosting our support availability. This efficiency frees up SiteGround’s human agents to tackle more complex issues, supercharging overall productivity.

Since its launch, our instant AI assistant has tackled over 1,500,000 questions and requests! By handling straightforward inquiries, it ensures that complex technical questions reach our support crew faster, resulting in quicker resolutions of higher-level inquiries as well. 

In just the first month of operation, 15% of all chats with our assistant involved operations performed on behalf of customers. While this may seem modest, it’s a testament to our careful selection of risk-free processes, ensuring nothing goes awry.

Even Higher Availability

Having said all that SiteGround’s human support isn’t going anywhere! Available 24/7, our average resolution time is just 15 minutes. But for those small requests, our instant AI chat assistant spares even that! It’s available round-the-clock, unaffected by occasional load peaks on our support channels.

But beyond mere stats and numbers, our focus is on enhancing customer experiences. That’s why we have a built-in grading system for every AI assistant chat and closely monitor feedback from clients across all channels, both internally and via trusted third-party review systems like Trustpilot.

Trusted Privacy 

We also understand that AI in customer service can raise data privacy concerns. This is especially true if you’re giving away sensitive information to AI models yourself. But SiteGround’s AI assistant, powered by GPT-4o by OpenAI and customized by our in-house AI engineering team, works under our strict data protection, encryption, and security policies. Your privacy remains intact, with no sensitive information disclosed to OpenAI. Even if you enter sensitive data in our AI chat engine, our system ensures it remains obfuscated, safeguarding your privacy.

Handling Complex Queries with Care

While our AI assistant shines in managing simple inquiries, we recognize its limitations with complex or unique customer issues for now. In these cases SiteGround’s human judgment and expertise is irreplaceable, highlighting the indispensable role of our human support. But even in some of these intricate cases, our AI assists by narrowing down problems and gathering data, streamlining the work for our operators.

Where SiteGround Humans are Irreplaceable

By automating routine tasks, SiteGround’s AI assistant optimizes operational times and allows us to allocate human resources more effectively. Given our high volumes of customer interactions, our human support remains irreplaceable. AI handles simple tasks effortlessly, but nothing beats human expertise, connection, and empathy.

In fact, while developing our AI technology, we’ve not only retained but expanded our nearly 200-person in-house support team. We’re actively onboarding new members and upskilling experienced ones, ensuring top-notch service.

Striking the Perfect Balance

We’re firm believers that integrating smart AI with human support is the key to maximizing customer care quality. By letting AI handle routine tasks and allowing human agents to focus on complex issues, we’ve elevated our service efficiency while maintaining a personal touch. Our staff is trained to work seamlessly alongside AI technologies, enhancing customer interactions, as our clients can attest.

To sum up, for 8 incredible years and counting, AI technology at SiteGround has been creating exceptional customer experiences—with a human touch always at the ready. If we had to answer THAT question, AI did take our job — only to the next level!