[January 24, 2014]

Belly Names Vice President of Merchant Success

Belly, the world's best and fastest growing loyalty platform, today announced that it has named 15-year technology startup veteran, Sarah Reilly Engel as Vice President of Merchant Success. In this role, Engel will drive advocacy for Belly's more than 7,000 merchants, while also leading customer retention and evangelizing efforts designed to help them achieve success.

Engel began her career in product marketing at investment firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, and headed west to San Francisco in early 2000 to join the startup culture of Silicon Valley. With roles at Red Herring Magazine and Salesforce.com (News - Alert), Engel developed a passion for working with early stage companies. As one of the first members of the Salesforce.com, the leading CRM platform's, Customer Success Management team, she was not only responsible for the top 10 percent of its customers, she also helped shape and develop scalable best practices that focused on delivering businesses tools to increase ROI through customer relationship management.

Her Enterprise SaaS (News - Alert) experience attracted desirable roles at digital media startups, where Engel spearheaded sales and account management efforts across New York and Chicago, and subsequently inspired the launch of her consulting firm dedicated to help such companies create go-to-market strategies spanning customer acquisition to retention.

"This is a dream role for me at Belly," Engel says. "I am fortunate to join a team of executives that fully understand theimportance of focusing on building a product that enables merchants to succeed while providing tools and features that tie directly to customer happiness and merchant retention. This is an opportunity that I could not pass up."

Belly takes the time and devotes the necessary effort and related resources to build connections that have helped it attain its leadership status in the digital loyalty space.

The Merchant Success team led by Engel will validate Belly's evolving dedication to exceptional customer service. Recently developed internal tools will help propel this philosophy - a newly launched Web Command Center with detailed analytics, data, and campaign tools, to add to the in-store Command Center, Zuora (News - Alert) implementation for more transparency and reporting around billing, back end tools that give the Merchant Success team the ability to give better data and analytics to their clients, and reporting functionality that gives insight on a particular store's health and overall success.

These back end tools will be a key component of the company's retention efforts, and will be continually tweaked based on key metrics and proxies to ensure long-term merchant success. Among its features are "red flag" metrics designed to track and monitor in-store tablets with the ability to diagnose any abnormality remotely; from battery health, screen brightness, location, heartbeats, performance by region, vertical, customer lifetime, etc.

"Since launch, we've tried to consistently invest in our merchant partners success and satisfaction, even if at times, we had to do so in unscalable ways," said Logan LaHive, CEO and founder of Belly. "Sarah brings experience and a real passion for Merchant Success, and with a focus on tools, content, and communication, we are thrilled to double down with her leading the team."

Belly is focused on creating a customer-centric organization that starts from the top and touches everything from sales, training, content marketing, analytics and product. The company's Merchant Success Managers will assist small business and provide direction on best practices to help them get customers back into their stores more often.

In addition to her past sales and managerial roles, Engel is a highly in-demand speaker on various panels and a regular contributor to multiple publications on digital loyalty and social media topics. She also leads workshops at Chicago digital accelerators, and Sales and Customer Success classes at the Chicago Startup Institute.

Belly is currently installed in more than 7,000 businesses nationwide. For more information, please visit www.bellycard.com.

About Belly:

Belly, which allows customers to accumulate loyalty points from multiple merchants on a single card or mobile-phone app, is in dozens of markets with more than 7,000 businesses. It has expanded from independent merchants to chains, with a platform that includes best-in-class iPhone and Android mobile apps, Belly Bites for better customer acquisition, tools to facilitate online customer reviews, and streamlined Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter integrations.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]