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Shopee's win-win strategy: Empowering employees to create impact through online shopping
From simplifying payments to ensuring fast delivery of goods, staff of the e-commerce platform find it rewarding to offer an experience customers will enjoy
Product manager Xu Yaohe is confident that the standalone ShopeePay app she’s worked on will allow more customers and merchants to conduct digital payments.
PHOTO: SHOPEE
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For Ms Xu Yaohe, this digital wallet she worked on is a massive point of pride.
As South-east Asia’s e-commerce grows, Shopee has extended its impact through e-wallets with ShopeePay to drive greater financial inclusion in the region.
“In many parts of South-east Asia, transferring money has typically incurred fees that can be quite prohibitive,” says the 30-year-old. “We want to minimise the costs to enable users to transact and transfer money freely.”
Ms Xu, after a stint at Ernst & Young as an IT consultant, joined the e-commerce giant in 2019 as a product manager overseeing a credit card gateway product.
“Having seen how digital payments evolved in the US and China, Shopee offered me an exciting and interesting opportunity to get involved with South-east Asia’s digital payments,” says the product manager for ShopeePay.
In her current role, Ms Xu works with different teams to improve the digital wallet’s services. She is focused on understanding user behaviour and building solutions that address their needs.
An example? The standalone ShopeePay app that was launched in Indonesia in February.
“Users’ phones may not be the newest models, so storage is limited, and the kind of apps they can run smoothly is limited as well,” Ms Xu shares. “The standalone ShopeePay app is lighter compared to our main e-commerce app, so it runs faster, giving more users access to digital payments to pay and transact freely.”
She is excited about the impact that ShopeePay has had in the larger story of financial inclusion, allowing more customers to pay for goods and services online, and more merchants – even brick-and-mortar ones – to accept digital payments.
“End users can transact more online. If you’re travelling and need to pay, or you’re a foreign worker looking to remit money back home, digital payment options like ShopeePay can be a way of doing so without incurring hefty fees,” Ms Xu says. For merchants, they can also target new segments of users to grow their business, she shares.
“It’s very rewarding to see how the things that we’ve done have changed people's lives.”
Hands-on experiences to improve Shopee's efficiency and service
Shopee has had a front-row seat to South-east Asia’s digital inclusion transformation – in 2021, the region saw 70 million new online shoppers emerge as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
With so many new customers coming on board, ensuring an optimal user experience was paramount – which is why for Mr Tan Hong Ting, Shopee’s customer service and warehouse operations are crucial to the e-commerce firm’s digital inclusion mission.
The 29-year-old’s journey with the company started in 2019, when he joined Shopee as a regional operations associate in the customer service department. In this role, he worked to make Shopee’s customer service more efficient using data-driven insights.
“I was looking for a work culture that was dynamic and vibrant,” he says. At Shopee, he found what he was looking for.
A breakthrough moment for his career happened when he was sent to Thailand in 2021. At the time, Shopee’s Thailand operations faced challenges with lockdowns and movement restrictions. While the restrictions led to a surge in new customers and orders as people turned to e-commerce to make their purchases, they also made it difficult for orders to be fulfilled on time.
Customer enquiries were through the roof, and the customer service team in Thailand was at the forefront of managing this load – more manpower and efficiency was needed.
As part of the team, Mr Tan helped develop training plans so that new staff could get up to speed quickly. He also worked on a chatbot featuring an automated reply system that guided customers on how they could find answers to common queries on the Shopee app, allowing the customer service team to handle more complex cases.
“We managed to bring down the abandon rates – where users give up before reaching a customer service representative – across all channels within a few weeks of implementing these solutions,” he says.
After his customer service stint, Mr Tan joined Shopee’s warehouse team in Thailand, working to optimise its operations.
“With warehouse operations, it was really about how we could minimise lead times and boost efficiency to ensure that every Shopee order is fulfilled with consistent quality,” he recalls. “What's the most optimal use of the warehouse to store the most amount of parcels? How can we make the parcel picking process more efficient?”
As part of the optimisation process, Mr Tan dedicated time to working directly in the warehouse. This hands-on experience provided him with a better understanding of the situation on the ground, enabling him to help the team develop effective solutions.
“The head of operations actually came down and packed parcels himself,” he shares. “It gave me a new perspective on leadership. It taught me that to make things happen, I should also lead by example and be ready to dive in – boots on the ground.”
For Mr Tan, driving digital inclusion hinges on providing an optimal customer experience, one that allows customers to enjoy the best of what the digital economy can offer. This is something he does as well in his current role, where he now spearheads the regional last-mile hub team at SPX Express, a Shopee logistics partner.
“The better the solution I come up with, the faster we can get products into the hands of our customers. That is something very tangible for millions of people,” Mr Tan shares.
Unlocking employees’ leadership potential
On top of their work helping users, Ms Xu and Mr Tan have made a difference to a group of people much closer to home: their teams.
Mr Tan has benefitted from the mentorship of senior management at Shopee and also participated in more formal initiatives such as the firm’s Accelerated Development Programme (ADP).
The ADP offers staff leadership training and one-on-one mentorship from senior leaders at the company, giving him not just tools that improved his abilities as a manager but also a network of peers and mentors.
“I’ve been very lucky to have mentors who have been very intentional in grooming me to be a leader,” he shares. “Now, I want to do the same with my team, to understand their motivations and put them in places where they can succeed.”
Ms Xu, too, gained new perspectives on management from the leadership training programmes. While she started out as a very “instructions-based” leader, she now tailors her management style to better support and guide her team members as they make their own decisions.
“I went from being a product manager to being a people manager as well,” she shares.
On the road ahead, both Ms Xu and Mr Tan are looking to make an even bigger difference through their work.
“South-east Asia is a very big market,” she says. “I want to gain a deeper understanding of the different markets and different user needs and better address the opportunities to facilitate cross-border payments across the whole region.”
“The top priority is always, ‘How can we serve our users better?’” Mr Tan shares.
This article was first published in Tech In Asia.
