Kannan Rajaratnam

Key Business Impact: Spearheaded the geographical expansion of ZALORA into Taiwan, driving a noteworthy NMV impact of EUR 8M.

· Team Establishment and Leadership: Established and led a team of 4 members from the ground up, fostering collaboration and excellence.

· Regulatory Compliance and Licensing: Navigated the complex regulatory landscape, successfully securing the elusive Payment Facilitator License, a rigorous process spanning 8-10 months.

· Cross-Functional Collaboration: Organized seamless cross-functional collaboration, ensuring the smooth launch of the local entity, including establishing vital payment channels and ensuring compliance with regulatory mandates.

· Introduction of Local Payment Methods: Introduced 2 local payment methods, enhancing customer convenience & market penetration.

· Operational Efficiency Enhancement: Implemented robust operational processes and procedures, optimizing day-to-day efficiency and performance, while maintaining clear and transparent communication with stakeholders.

Key Business Impact: On-boarded 32 payment methods in 24 months, acquiring 1 million new customers and reducing payment costs by 4.9%.

· Strategic Payment Growth and Fraud Management: Devised and executed strategies to drive new customer acquisition, improve transaction value, and reduce payment costs to below 1.6% of revenue.

· Innovative Integration: Integrated 6 BNPL and e-wallet services, utilizing over EUR6M in marketing funds to promote adoption.

· Efficient Fraud Management: Maintained an annual fraud loss below EUR20K, with total fraud management costs below EUR40K, while achieving a 95% authorization rate.

· Implemented proactive fraud prevention measures, including rigorous address verification, to ensure secure deliveries.

· Revenue Recovery Initiative: Introduced a repayment feature, recovering an average of EUR6M in lost revenue annually.

· Strategic Partnership Negotiations: Negotiated sponsorships totaling SGD1.1M in 2019, SGD2M in 2020, and SGD4M in 2021 to boost relevant payment channels.

Key Business Impact: Launched a generative AI-backed chatbot handling 60% of customer contacts in 2020, delivering EUR750K in cost savings until 2023. Implemented various contact ratio reduction initiatives, slashing total contacts by 50%and reducing items shipped contact ratio by 40% to 4.5%.

· Operational Leadership and Management: Directed 280 employees across 3 locations in South East Asia, managing an SGD2Mbudget, ensuring operational efficiency.

· Refund Automation and Service Level Maintenance: Achieved the fastest refund processing time of 2 hours and 23 minutes, cutting 2500 monthly refund-related contacts.

· Maintained service levels above 90%/20 for voice and email resolution time, with a cost per contact below EU1.50.

· Process Improvements: Implemented initiatives reducing total contacts by 50% in 2020, focusing on operational excellence.

· Retail and Exchange Module Development: Established and developed a retail and exchange module, enabling customers to exchange fashion apparel themselves, scaling the feature from 10employees to 100 employees.

· Customer Experience Transformation: Strategically elevated customer satisfaction from 40++ NPS in 2013 to 87% in 2023, driving loyalty and NPS improvement.

· Industry Leadership and Collaboration: Engaged as an Executive Committee member for the Contact Center Association of Malaysia, contributing to industry best practices and initiatives.

Key Business Impact: Directed a 40-member team across 9 functions, including contact centers, payments, and CRM, driving a customer-centric approach for the APAC region.

· Process Optimization and Efficiency: Engineered new processes, reducing monthly contacts from 40,000to 27,000 and improving email response time to 100% within 8 hours.

· Performance Metrics Improvement: Achieved a contact-to-vouchers sold ratio of 9.8%, surpassing the global benchmark of 15%.

· Process Optimization: Reduced refund rate from 3.07% to 2.57% through stringent control on merchant onboarding and fine prints, resulting in cost savings.

· Streamlined Operations: Developed 12 new sets of processes related to after-sales product warranty and local deal refunds, streamlining operations.

Key Business Impact: Restructured global weekend operations, optimizing resources and implementing new shifts, resulting in a cost saving of USD51K per year. Supported multiple skill set operations, resolving technical issues efficiently on remote access, blackberry, Windows OS, and Linux platforms.

· Team Leadership and Coaching: Led a weekend shift team of 13 FTEs, providing coaching, scheduling, and knowledge training to enhance team performance and productivity.

· Process Improvement & Knowledge Management:Revamped & documented new knowledge base processes, improving efficiency and facilitating knowledge transfer within the team.

· Consistent High Performance: Maintained service level above 90% throughout 2 years of operation, demonstrating consistently high performance.