Reducing customer pain boosts billions

David Marcus

President PayPal

PayPal’s global CEM program is massive: the company monitors customer experiences with all global service channels and transactions. And handling over 43 million customer contacts per year, PayPal’s service volume is large. Through Medallia, PayPal solicits feedback in 27 different languages from service transactions via IVR, phone, email and back office interactions. This feedback is then delivered in real-time to the right service center Team Members to take action. Now equipped with customized customer data, each of these 20+ service centers and nearly 9,000 agents have the right information to drive improvement. Clear, tailored actions have significantly boosted engagement with the CEM platform.

Reducing pain points

In one year alone the team identified 20 such pain points — both on the merchant and the consumer sides of the business. They then developed and tested and rolled out solutions through A/B testing. With this approach, PayPal not only measured substantial decreases in pain points and increases in satisfaction, but has also quantified significant financial gains due to these improvements.

“Listening. Hearing. Responding: Our operations teams are tremendous internal advocates for our customers. They identified a set of complex customer pain points in multiple areas based on internal research and direct feedback from our customers, and I’m happy to say that so far we’ve solved more than half of these top issues. As a result… we’ve tracked 40 million fewer issues that customers have experienced than last year,” says David Marcus, President, PayPal.

Complex segmentation

Medallia also helps PayPal deliver and improve differentiated customer experiences—a priority for many large-scale CEM programs. PayPal segments its customer across different axes, including merchants, consumers, and frequent users. Based on these segments, PayPal routes customers to specific centers and agents to deliver the right differentiated experience, and then monitors those tailored experiences through Medallia. For example, frequent users are routed to top service agents with the shortest wait time, to ensure they have only the best experiences. Similarly, PayPal routes new customers to a new member queue, in which agents spend more time educating those customers up front, helping reduce repeat calls later on.

Medallia insights

Serving customers around the globe, PayPal wanted to better train its agents according to different cultural expectations and perceptions. So, PayPal partnered with Medallia’s Insights team to study the impact of culture on agent satisfaction scores. Results from the key driver analysis were clear: customers across all studied cultures value the same attributes in agent behavior, such as clear communication or agent knowledge. What’s more—the top three attributes lie within the agent’s control. Based on these insights, PayPal then developed training guidelines and metrics for agents, to ensure they continually improve in those areas.

Source: Case Study, Reducing Customer Pain Points Boosts Billions