GoDaddy Customer Care Center

The world’s leading website domain registrar, GoDaddy, wanted to expand and improve its largest customer care center, which employs more than 1,300 people in Gilbert, Arizona. The existing space, a former data center, was not on par with GoDaddy’s culture of providing the best place to work in the notoriously competitive tech industry. It turned to SmithGroup, its design partner for the GoDaddy headquarters in nearby Tempe, for a complete interior renovation of the newly expanded Gilbert space. The center is integral to GoDaddy’s operations and needed to remain fully staffed 24 hours a day throughout the project.

The GoDaddy renovation brings the firm’s characteristic fun and flair to the Gilbert customer care center, with an updated, more polished aesthetic in line with the corporate culture shift and rebranding that occurred during the renovation. Completed in eight phases to accommodate GoDaddy’s round-the-clock operations, the project transformed a dim, crowded space into an uplifting, amenity-rich workplace. Double-height ceilings, a central stair, ample daylight, artful LED lighting, and streamlined finishes come together in an appealing environment that represents GoDaddy’s evolving culture and demonstrates its commitment to its team.

The renovation touched every corner of the 180,000-square-foot center, which includes individual workstations, meeting and conferencing spaces, an auditorium for larger events, lobby and self-service café. Most noticeable is how bright and spacious the entire workplace has become. The team punched through the ground-floor ceiling to unite the two levels with a large central communicating stair, then added windows that bring natural light into the open volume and give employees a visual connection to the outdoors.

The design provides an array of more intimate touchdown spaces, too, accented with warm wood, soft furnishings and artistic lighting. At the top of the communicating stair, “The Clubhouse” carves out a no-technology zone with massage chairs and a variety of seating—even a chair swing—for relaxation and respite. The Clubhouse was added to the design during the build-out, responding to a simultaneous shift in GoDaddy corporate culture.  

The renovation also relocated the secure lobby, added numerous training and meeting rooms and expanded the café as an indoor/outdoor space that can accommodate food truck vendors. In the midst of the project, GoDaddy revamped its branding with a new logo. The team addressed the change quickly and cost effectively by selecting more neutral tones and natural finishes, employing the new logo color as a bright accent for walls and furnishings. Able to deftly navigate change, GoDaddy’s new Gilbert workplace embodies the agility that has made GoDaddy an overwhelming tech industry success.