Direct Merchant Program Specialist

Direct Merchant Program Specialist Department: Community Operations Team: Support Operations Location: Tokyo, Japan Type: Full-Time **About the Role** The Program Specialist IV (Direct LoB) will own end-to-end operational excellence, stakeholder alignment, and program management for Japan’s Direct Merchant business. This role serves as the primary CommOps point of contact for Direct workflows, ensuring stable day-to-day operations, scalable process design, and readiness for product launches and merchant-facing policy changes. The candidate will be responsible for maintaining and improving key support metrics (CSAT, Contact Rate, Automation Rate, etc), driving VOC insights, leading cross-functional initiatives, and ensuring operational continuity across Sales, Account Management, BPO vendors, Product, and Operations teams. As YoY Direct trips grow and new retail/logistics use cases expand, this role is critical to sustaining reliability, partner trust, and business growth. **Your Impact in Role:** 1. Manage program governance for Direct-related initiatives, ensuring smooth launch readiness, scalable adoption, and high-quality merchant and customer experiences. 2. Drive incident and escalation management, serving as the first-line contact during outages, major campaigns, and merchant-impacting events. 3. Analyze operational data (CTGs, trends, inflow) to identify issues, propose improvements, and guide cross-functional teams toward actionable solutions. 4. Develop and maintain standardized operating procedures, training, and documentation to support BPO and partner teams. 5. Collaborate with Product teams to surface VOC, identify feature gaps, submit bug/UX requests, and influence the roadmap for Japan’s Direct business. 6. Lead BPO/vendor management for Direct workflows, ensuring performance, quality, and compliance across all support channels. 7. Support commercial growth initiatives, including retail expansion (Momo, PChome, Yamato), grocery use cases, contract renewals with national merchants, and new delivery models (3W, DP pickup, microDC). 8. Partner with local and regional leadership t