How PayPal puts customers at the center of decisions

When it comes to innovation at global scale, few companies have as much reach and responsibility as PayPal. The financial platform serves more than 400 million active accounts worldwide, employs around 24,000 people and generates roughly $32 billion in annual revenue. Yet behind those massive numbers lies a philosophy grounded in something simple: listening to customers.

That’s what Wook Chung, PayPal’s Senior Vice President of Product, Risk and Core Platforms, emphasized during a recent webinar with unitQ CEO and Co-founder Christian Wiklund.

“At the end of the day, there is a human behind each device,” Chung says. 

Measuring quality through customer value

For Chung, product quality is measured not just in technical success but in user outcomes.

“My primary bar of quality is that … did the customer achieve the value that we’re intending to give to them?” he explains, later adding: “And then for those that realize the value, do they now become more loyal power users, repeat users and so on and so forth.”

That’s why PayPal closely monitors customer feedback alongside behavioral data, he says.

“As we roll things out, absolutely, we listen in on our customer feedback channels … to understand whether, genuinely, people are confused or not,” Chung says.

He says that, at PayPal, “we always remind ourselves that we are dealing with people’s money.”

“It is one of the most important things about people's lives. And so, the livelihood of merchants and our consumers live with our platform. So we are very, very careful and responsible … as we roll out changes and roll out new features.”

The human side of customer feedback

“I look for, effectively, priorities that ring the customer's heart with empathy, emotional need, functional need,” he says.

Chung shared how PayPal analyzes call and chat transcripts to understand user sentiment in moments of frustration or trust.

“If you really listen to the call transcripts," he says, “sometimes it's heartbreaking.”

“This was their last opportunity to put food on the table for this week, for example. And that just does not come through when you adjudicate a dispute just purely looking at whether this was right or wrong.”

Feedback should be understood through both a functional and emotional perspective, he says.

“When you are able to empathize and truly, truly, truly understand the customer problem — not just customer problem from a functional perspective but an emotional perspective — that’s where I think when those two align, we treat this as a very high priority.”

One such example is PayPal’s “instant resolution” feature for trusted customers and merchants.

“The moment that you submit a dispute, our AI and systems automatically compute, and if we believe that you deserve your money back, we would first give you your money back instantly,” he says, adding: “And whenever we give instant resolutions, we see our NPS spike up like crazy. It’s the ultimate evidence that PayPal has your back.”

Connecting customer feedback to business impact

PayPal measures success through Total Payment Volume (TPV), its core North Star metric.

“TPV only goes up when everything goes right,” Chung explains, “meaning that it’s a cumulative metric that everybody in this company can row together. For example, are we able to … provide enough value to merchants that they prioritize PayPal?”

But to understand what drives or erodes that metric, behavioral data alone isn’t enough. That’s where customer feedback comes into play, he says.

“Simple usage patterns and data are just not enough because, effectively, it could be a false leading indicator or a false lagging indicator,” Chung says. “What a person thinks about PayPal, and when a customer really gives us trust and leans on us — that is genuinely felt through these personal moments.”

Why PayPal chose unitQ

When PayPal began working with unitQ, Chung says he saw immediate alignment around curiosity and understanding.

“From day one, anybody and everybody I’ve met from unitQ was always focused on understanding the customer,” he says. “And understanding could mean a whole variety of things here, but I was really intrigued by unitQ’s philosophy on getting to the next level of understanding.”

He says unitQ empowers PayPal with a “treasure trove” of customer feedback data and at “finding patterns that humans can’t possibly do.”

“And especially at PayPal’s scale, we definitely need that,” Chung says.

Chung says he is a “quite a big fan of unitQ, largely because I feel like unitQ is almost a partner and a secret kind of a weapon for me.”

“When I say a secret, you know, weapon, I mean that customers are never wrong,” he says. “So how could what unitQ shows me every single day not be helpful for me?”

Using your own product

When asked what advice he’d give to others striving to build customer-centric cultures, Chung didn’t hesitate.

“You gotta use your own product,” he says. “There is no better way to empathize with the customer, even before the feedback comes in.”

If you don’t use your own product, he says, “You are never gonna be able to truly empathize … why customers might feel a certain way. Now, granted, you yourself might be a biased category, but it doesn't matter.”

Building products that stir emotion

As the conversation closed, Chung reflected on the future of product development in the AI era.

“I really, really think that product management and the way we build products gets closer and closer to emotion. And emotion cannot be measured in events and data points,” he says. “This is the reason why staying close to customer feedback, scattered or not, I think is a very, very important skill set, as well as a toolkit for any modern-day company, whether you're big or small.”

David Kravets is Senior Content Marketing Manager at unitQ.