The opportunity
About this role
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