Head of Merchant Happiness

About 

BukuWarung is building the digital and financial infrastructure for micro and small businesses in Southeast Asia. We empower millions of MSMEs through payments, credit, and financial tools - helping them grow faster, safer, and more profitably.

Our merchants trust us with their money, livelihoods, and businesses. That trust is our most valuable asset - and Merchant Happiness is the frontline guardian of that.

Why This Role Matters

BukuWarung already serves millions of MSMEs across payments, lending, and financial services. As we scale, customer trust, resolution quality, and emotional experience will increasingly determine retention, advocacy, and long-term business value.

Head of Merchant Happiness is a strategic leadership role that directly impacts:

• Merchant retention and lifetime value

• Brand credibility in moments of crisis

• Feedback velocity into product and operations

You will play a key role in ensuring Merchant Happiness is a proactive, data-driven, business-critical growth engine.

The role is responsible for owning the end-to-end customer experience across all service channels. This role leads customer service operations, manages large-scale issues and crises, improves service quality, and ensures customer trust - especially in high-impact or sensitive situations. This leader will work closely with Product, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Engineering and other departments to drive continuous improvements.

What you will own

Customer Service Operations

• Build scalable service processes that can handle high volume and rapid growth.

• Ensure day-to-day operations run smoothly while meeting SLAs, quality standards, and compliance requirements.

• Own SLAs, turnaround times, escalation frameworks, and resolution accuracy.

• Build operating models that balance speed, compliance, and merchant trust.

• Define and drive the overall customer experience strategy across the customer journey.

• Identify key pain points and translate customer feedback into actionable improvements.

• Ensure consistent, clear, and empathetic customer communication across all touchpoints.

Crisis & Issue Management

• Lead response during major incidents, outages, or systemic issues impacting customers.

• Act as the main decision-maker for customer-facing resolutions during crises.

• Coordinate closely with internal stakeholders (Product, Tech, Risk, Legal) to manage impact and recovery.

Quality & Continuous Improvement

• Maintain & improve quality frameworks (QA, audits, feedback loops, root cause analysis).

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce repeat issues and customer complaints.

• Use data and insights to proactively improve service performance and customer satisfaction.

• Represent the merchant perspective in leadership, product, and policy forums.

• Ensure merchant impact is explicitly considered in every major business decision.

• Build tight feedback loops from CX into Product, Ops, Risk, and Tech.

Leadership & Team Development

• Build, mentor, and develop high-performing team members.

• Set clear goals, performance metrics, and accountability across teams.

• Foster a strong customer-first culture across the organization.

Stakeholder & Executive Management

• Partner with senior leadership to align customer service strategy with business objectives.

• Provide clear, structured reporting on service performance, risks, and improvement plans.

• Act as the voice of the customer in leadership discussions and decision-making.

What Success Looks Like (First 6-12 Months)

1. Merchant trust scores materially improve.

2. Complaint recurrence drops significantly.

3. Crisis response becomes faster, calmer, and more structured.

4. CX insights directly influence product and policy roadmaps.
   

You will need

• 10+ years in Customer Experience, Customer Operations, or Service Leadership.

• Strong exposure to fintech, banking, payments, lending, or regulated environments preferred.

• Proven crisis leadership experience.

• Experience scaling teams in high-growth environments.

Capabilities

• Exceptionally structured thinker & strong decision-making under pressure

• Data-driven, but deeply empathetic

• Comfortable with challenging products, risk, and leadership when merchant trust is at stake

• Can operate both strategically and hands-on

Mindset

• Merchant trust > short-term metrics

• Obsessed with long-term impact, not cosmetic fixes

• Takes ownership when things break

• Read here to know more about our culture