Merchant Retention Lead

About Us Tamara is a leading fintech platform in Saudi Arabia and the GCC region with a mission to help people own their dreams built on being simple, trusted, and everywhere our customers need us. Today, more than 25 million customers and over 130,000 partner merchants depend on Tamara every day for reliable financial solutions across retail, travel, education, healthcare, and beyond. Tamara is backed by Sanabil Investments, a wholly owned company of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), and SNB Capital, among others. Your role The Merchant Retention Lead owns the retention and reactivation of unmanaged SMB merchants across the UAE. This role leads a team of specialists who contact churned merchants to understand why they stopped transacting and resolve or escalate the issue. The team also proactively monitors unmanaged merchants whose order volume is slowing down, identifies the reasons behind the decline, and provides the right support before they fully churn. Your responsibilities: Team leadership and execution: - Lead, coach, and performance-manage a team of Specialists - Set team priorities, merchant portfolios, outreach targets, and follow-up SLAs - Establish a clear daily and weekly operating rhythm for calls, follow-ups, escalations, and performance reviews - Monitor call quality, CRM updates, and action-plan execution - Ensure each merchant case has a clear churn or slowdown reason, next action, owner, and follow-up date Churn and slowdown management - Own outreach to churned merchants with no orders for a predetermined number of days - Build an early-intervention approach for unmanaged merchants whose transaction volume is slowing down - Ensure the team identifies the root cause behind churn or declining activity through structured merchant conversations - Define action plans for each churn reason, including issue resolution, training, product support, or escalation - Track merchants through the recovery journey and confirm whether they resume transacting SOPs, frameworks, and insights - Build and maintain the team’s SOPs, call guides, churn-reason framework, escalation paths, and recovery playbooks - Create clear definitions and processes for churned, slowing-down, contacted, in-recovery, reactivated, and unresolved merchants - Analyze churn and slowdown reasons to identify recurring patterns by merchant segment, issue type, and outcome - Share merchant feedback and systemic problems with the relevant teams and leadership - Recommend improvements to products, processes, training, communications, or commercial policies based on merchant insights Cross-functional coordination - Work with Product, Engineering, Care, Risk, Finance, Commercial, Onboarding, Training, and Operations teams to resolve merchant issues - Escalate blockers to the correct owner and follow through until resolution or a clear outcome is reached - Highlight repeated issues that affect multiple merchants and support the development of long-term fixes - Maintain clear communication with stakeholders on recovery performance, risks, and support required Performance management and reporting - Track team activity and outcomes, including contact rate, reason identification, follow-up completion, reactivation rate, and recovered transaction volume - Provide regular reporting on churn reasons, slowing-down merchants, open blockers, and recovery actions - Review team performance and coach specialists based on quality, productivity, and merchant outcomes - Maintain accurate and timely CRM records for all merchant interactions and next steps Your expertise - 2+ years of experience in merchant success, retention, account management, customer success, sales, or a related function - Previous experience leading or coaching a customer-facing team - Strong communication and problem-solving skills - Ability to build practical SOPs, frameworks, and action plans - Experience managing performance through KPIs, operating cadences, and coaching - Strong stakeholder-management and escalation skills - Analytical mindset and ability to identify patterns from merchant feedback and performance data - High ownership and follow-through on open merchant issues - Strong CRM discipline and attention to detail - Experience in fintech, payments, BNPL, e-commerce, or merchant acquiring - Experience working with SMB merchants in the UAE - Experience in churn prevention, customer retention, or merchant reactivation - Arabic language capability alongside professional English