Interview with SiteGround COO Reneta Tsankova

What’s it like to be the Chief Operating Officer for a web hosting company? We recently had the opportunity to talk with Reneta Tsankova, the COO for SiteGround. It was a great chance to not only find out more about SiteGround, but also what her job entails and what she considers are SiteGround’s greatest accomplishments.

Web Hosting Cat: As the Chief Operating Officer for SiteGround, what’s your typical day like?

Reneta Tsankova: Well, I work on all projects that are focused on our product development, on the expansion of our services and their improvement. I’m also dedicating a lot of my time on our international expansion. We already actually have an office in Spain and we are launching operations there very shortly. So, that takes a lot of work.

WHC: So there’s a lot of expansion going on?

RT: Yes. We’ve been growing very fast for the last two years. And we are constantly hiring great people. This also takes a lot of work, because we are very famous for hiring quality people–training them to be even better. And, the whole process of selection, pre-screening people, having them on board—we take this very seriously.

WHC: Do you have a training program that your customer support staff goes through?

RT: Very extensive training programs. Every new person, they usually have at least two weeks to four weeks training without even talking to clients—just theoretical training. Then, they start talking to clients under the supervision of a mentor or a supervisor who is helping them pretty much in every reply they make to clients. After between a month and two months, they could be independent and working on their own. We organize a series of trainings after this initial training, and this goes for about 3 to 6 months until we think they’re qualified to actually train the clients without any additional supervision or support from their managers.

WHC: If someone were to ask you what makes SiteGround superior to other web hosting companies, what would you tell them?

RT: I would tell them it’s about our drive, our philosophy, how we do things. We are always aiming at being better and better–doing it better than the others for sustainability, for growth. Most of the things we develop, we develop in-house with the purpose of actually building smarter solutions and superior solutions in terms of what our software does or our service does. But it’s also our customer service. It’s also the same philosophy that drives us for quality. We want our people to be better. We want our service to be better.

WHC: Earlier this year, we spoke with Hristo Pandjarov, your WordPress and SEO Expert at SiteGround. He talked about some of the technical accomplishments you’ve had. I’m wondering, from a strategic or managerial standpoint, what are you most proud about with respect to SiteGround accomplishments?

RT: Well, there are many things. Maybe in the area of server administration, I think we have lots of achievements there. It’s about how we secure our servers, how we speed up and optimize the whole server monitoring and service recovery in case of incidents, how we actually protect from incidents. These are really solid things. They are noticed by our clients.

WHC: Are you able to share any news with our audience about SiteGround’s plans for the future?

RT: The one thing that we’re really focused on is international expansion—Spain being the first country we’re going to launch operations in and some other European countries that we’re interested in as well. We would like to improve the whole interaction of the client with our platform. So, we will be reworking our user area in terms of making this experience better and easier for the different user segments that we have. So this will be a big project and will probably take six months, a year maybe to actually finalize it and launch it.

You can hear the full audio interview with Reneta Tsankova on the Web Hosting Cat Podcast