Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Roy Siew

Coming in as a finalist in our leadership rankings is Roy Siew (pictured), who has more than 15 years of experience in eCommerce. Siew has earned his stripes at Tune Protect Group having played a pivotal role in the digital and customer experience transformation journey.

He is currently heading the eCommerce department at Tune Protect Group, and is responsible for growing and developing the company’s many eCommerce initiatives. He also has experience leading digital marketing teams at a range of companies – he was the head of digital for three and a half years at Berjaya Sompo Insurance, and head of digital for four years at AXA General Insurance Malaysia. Before that, he was at CompareXpress and GluayGluay.

Under his leadership, Tune Protect Group has adopted an agile methodology and a nonhierarchical approach that focuses on transparency, team collaboration, and where every voice has equal weight. One to roll up his sleeves to get the work done, he said the whole team at Tune Protect Malaysia takes turns to handle the brand’s online live chat and emails to better understand customers’ needs.

“We set clear KPIs shared by the whole department where everyone carries the same sales targets – be it a marketer or developer,” he said.

Adopting this practice as the essence of the eCommerce team, individuals have been brought into the squad with clearly defined goals.

Siew is personally proud of the brand’s growth on limited marketing spends. Tune Protect Malaysia has been selling online direct to customers since 2015, and at the end of October 2022, the number of online customers had grown more than eight times on the previous year on a limited budget.

He added that as a digital insurer, the company places a huge emphasis on being innovative and quick on its feet – whether it’s responding to a customer or capitalising on a golden opportunity.

“It’s part of our differentiation strategy as we compete in an industry with highly commoditised products,” he said.

One such example came about at the tail end of 2021 when the Malaysian borders began to reopen with the Langkawi Travel Bubble. The company responded by launching COVID Travel Pass+, an inbound online travel insurance aimed at tourists visiting Malaysia. From product development to an eCommerce platform going live, the whole execution took less than four weeks.

Within the first two months of the launch in January 2022, the insurer sold 500 policies organically. From March 2022, Siew and his team ramped up its marketing efforts, targeting six countries via Google SEM, Facebook interest targeting, and TikTok in-feed ads, and as of October 2022, it had successfully acquired 16,000 online customers.