How SREs Found More than $100 Million Using Failed Customer Interactions

Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - 4:05 pm4:45 pm

Wes Hummel, PayPal

Abstract: 

This talk will go into PayPal SRE's journey of using data around customer failures (outward-looking) instead of payment data (inward looking) to become a more customer-focused company. The results not only benefitted our millions of merchants and consumers, but also benefitted our company in a significant way. Topics covered will be:

  • The Principles used when starting the initiative
  • The technical implementation of using Failed Customer Interactions (FCIs)
  • The dashboards and visualizations of the data
  • The culture change that occurred in the company as a result of the initiative
  • The tactical efforts needed to get momentum behind this new way of measuring
  • The bad ideas and mistakes we made along the way
  • The results and where we're at today

Wes Hummel, PayPal

Wes Hummel is the Head of Site Reliability Engineering and Site Operations at PayPal. He and his team partner with Customer Support, Merchant Technical Support, Product Development, and other teams in PayPal to ensure customers have the best possible experiences. After spending over two decades in software development, technical operations, and leading teams, Wes knows how to deliver high quality software and solutions that delight customers - by understanding what problems they are trying to solve and how they run their businesses and lives.

Wes holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration.

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BibTeX
@conference {213082,
author = {Wes Hummel},
title = {How {SREs} Found More than $100 Million Using Failed Customer Interactions},
year = {2018},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}

Presentation Video