Lazada CEO on a journey to improve consumer, seller experience

• Growth of company in next two years is critical
• New customer and sellers app to drive greater usage and transparency

LAZADA’S new chief executive officer Christophe Lejeune has only been in the CEO’s chair for a few months but he is very focused on accelerating Lazada’s growth strategy to be the best e-commerce website for its customers and he also wants to encourage more Malaysian entrepreneurs to sell on the platform.

“I am very happy to take on the role of CEO now that Hans-Peter Ressel has been promoted to the group chief international officer. It is a fantastic opportunity to take on this role at Lazada as now I am able to look at the business from end-to-end,” said Lejeune who was Lazada’s chief commercial officer since he joined the company 2015.

He spoke of how e-commerce has been in Malaysia for the past six years and this comes on the back of Lazada’s strong year-end sales like the 11.11 Single’s Day event that generated more than RM100 million (US$23.85 million) in gross merchandise value (GMV)

Lejeune intends to keep Lazada’s position as the number one e-commerce player in Malaysia by accelerating the company’s current strategy in improving customer experience.

“This is just the beginning because the growth that is going to happen in the next two years is much more important than that we experienced in the past. We must raise the bar and continue on this strong momentum,” he said after the launch of Lazada’s Milk Formula Guarantee Programme that seeks to ensure the reliability and freshness of milk formula sold on its platform.

Despite being a CEO, Lejeune describes himself as being a big Lazada user, having placed over 400 orders in the past two years. As a father of two young children, Lejeune admits that he does order a lot of baby products like milk formula and diapers on the platform.

He holds the belief that everything starts with the customer and in his tenure as CEO he wants to raise the bar even higher for Lazada by bringing on board more brands while engaging with customers closely via their newly revamped mobile app that was pushed out in early 2018.

A large part of Lazada’s aim to improve its overall customer experience lies in the enhanced customisability of its mobile app that offers different products to individual users. Using an algorithm that is based on a customer’s browsing behaviour and past purchases, Lejeune says that the app will only show products that customers actually want or are interested in.

Apart from that, Lejeune highlighted Lazada’s increased focus on developing its next big initiative, dubbed “Everyone Can Sell” that seeks to make it easier than ever for virtually anyone to start selling on the platform.

“We want to make our sellers rich and work to implement new technologies that will help them including our new seller app. With it you can open your shop in just 15 minutes,” he says.

Lazada said it has also reduced their commission to sellers to enable them to be more profitable and also introduced a community feature that enables sellers to collaborate and learn from one another.

“Some sellers tell me that selling on Lazada can be complex as they have seen success selling offline. But selling online is very easy and we are making it even easier for anyone regardless of age and background across Malaysia to participate in the growing e-commerce market,” he said.

He adds that Lazada aims to keep the buying and selling process as transparent as possible, even adding a real-time chat feature in the future that would enable Lazada customers to correspond directly with sellers should they have any queries on the product they want to buy.

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