Hello Fresh's Payments Team in A meal-kit company

HelloFresh in brief

HelloFresh SE is the leading global meal-kit company that operates in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden. HelloFresh delivered 69 million meals to 2.6 million active customers worldwide in Q3 2019 (July 1 - September 30, 2019). HelloFresh was founded in Berlin in November 2011 and went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in November 2017. HelloFresh has offices in New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Sydney, Toronto, Auckland and Copenhagen.

As a subscription service provider, what are some of the challenges you face and how do you approach them?

With our subscription business model, it can happen that a meal box is delivered, but the payment has not yet been collected. This is the moment that my team has to monitor the process closely, to ensure that we recover the funds. We use common channels - namely email, text messages and letters. In some countries, we like to use local and familiar tools, in the Netherlands for example, we use Tikkie.

How do you tackle debt collection and unresponsive customers?

Similarly to most subscription companies, we do come across customers who are unresponsive or unwilling to pay the outstanding balance, and we ensure that our terms and conditions cover us as much as possible. We also work hand-in-hand with our collection agency to solve these cases.

How do you figure out if a payment method is needed in a specific market?

We perform market research, and we also rely on our payment service provider’s advice. We conduct surveys and listen to our new and existing customers when they tell us which payment methods they would like the option to use.

In which areas of the business does the payments team play a strong role?

The payments team plays a primarily core role cross-department with the finance team, due to its direct impact on the revenue and debt. Secondly, with customer service by listening, analysing and helping our customers on a daily basis. Their feedbacks and complaints help us to improve our service constantly. Also, they are directly impacted by a new launch or issues with the product. Finally, with the marketing team by monitoring and controlling the marketing campaigns.

What are the main success factors that contribute to making a great payments team?

The ability to work cross-department, but also having a deep understanding of the local customers’ purchase behaviour. Customers are at the heart of everything we do, and customers can sometimes experience a payment issue which in most cases is not intentional or a major issue. We need to be flexible and service-minded to solve it as quickly as we can for them.

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