Merchant panel

Merchant Panel

Outcome:

Quarter 1 2022 all merchant recruitment for Singapore and Indonesia was primarily done through the merchant panel reducing the cost of recruitment by 65% and time of recruitment by 45%, compared to done by external recruitment companies prior to the panel.
Positive feedback from the merchants and account managers that the recruitment is conducted with more understanding to merchants needs rather than what felt like cold calls from recruitment agencies. Led to improved relationships with major merchants such as McDonalds, Lotte Grosser.
By 2023 panel was populated with merchants from Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Aim: To ensure fast and efficient access to Merchant user group for research projects. Merchants were one of the most difficult, time consuming and high cost user groups to recruit. Merchant panel was created by leveraging exiting merchant relationships, giving merchants a better say in when and which research studies they would like to be part of, creating value for merchants through effectively communicating what was improved based on their feedback, creating a community with panel members so merchants can help each other and providing closer relationship between merchants in the panel and the product team.

Released in June 2021 . Latest iteration Feb 2023.

My involvement:

Pioneered the creation of the merchant panel.
Lead the end to end creation. This involved creating a vision, a road map, project management, and managing iterations.
Managing relationships with merchants and internal merchants teams (Account managers, Business development, Merchant operations and Merchant product development.

Lessons learnt:

Initial buy-in for merchants to be part of the panel was challenging. Clear and consistent communication of value through multiple channels was necessary.
Merchants trust was highly relationship based therefore it was critical the ground operations teams, account managers saw the value of the panel and actively evangelized.
It was necessary to set clear expectations with product team. Once the panel was launched there was a ask for research participants for large number of projects in very tight timeline.