The posting
Location: On-site at the FinAgra Kenya office, Westlands, Nairobi.
Reports to: Head of REP Program.
Works closely with: REP Program team, the regional field teams, Controls & Performance, Procurement & Supply Chain, Tech & Data, and Agronomy & Operations.
Employment type: Full-time
Role purpose
FinAgra's REP (Rural Entrepreneurial Partner — agribusiness people partnering, or wishing to partner, with FinAgra) onboarding journey happens on the candidate's phone, mostly over WhatsApp — but a real person is always behind the scenes. The REP Onboarding & Field Coordination Operator is that person.
Operators work from Slack, where their messages reach candidates on WhatsApp, and guide each candidate through onboarding — from the first welcome to the handover to the Head of REP Program for the closing call and first-season plan. Candidates are often rural farmers who may be new to digital forms, so clear, patient, plain-language communication (in both English and Swahili) is essential.
The role also holds the office end of field operations. Several teams work different regions at once, and every visit needs a schedule, a vehicle, working connectivity, and somewhere for the results to land. The Operator plans that week, keeps the teams moving, and makes sure nothing gathered in the field is lost on the way back.
Why this role exists
- Keep every REP candidate moving smoothly through the eight-step onboarding journey, with low drop-off between steps.
- Put a warm, human, responsive presence behind a phone-based, WhatsApp-first process — especially for candidates new to digital forms.
- Give the field teams one point of contact for schedules, transport and logistics, so senior staff are not coordinating their own travel.
- Make sure every field visit produces a record — candidate details, land measurements, KYC documents — that reaches the right system the same day.
- Protect candidate data and ensure clean, well-documented handovers to the Head of REP Program.
Key responsibilities
1. Candidate onboarding (Slack → WhatsApp)
- Run WhatsApp conversations with assigned REP candidates from the Slack operator console.
- Send the right message at each step: welcome and journey overview, questionnaire link, secure continuation link, identity-check (KYC) prompt, approval message, and call-booking link.
- Answer questions simply and set expectations — “no rush,” “your answers save automatically,” “there are no wrong answers.”
- Follow up gently with candidates who go quiet or leave a form incomplete.
- Track each candidate's stage across the eight-step journey and keep clear notes for a smooth handover.
- Keep candidate data safe.
- Escalate anything that needs a specialist (agronomy, technical, or eligibility) to the right team.
- Hand approved candidates to the Head of REP Program for the call, training, and first-season plan.
2. Field team coordination
- Build and circulate the coming week’s field visit schedule, grouping visits by area so teams cover the most ground with the least travel.
- Confirm each team’s composition and route before deployment, and hold a short daily check-in call with every team in the field.
- Book and allocate vehicles against the schedule, and plan in-field handovers so team leads are not returning to Nairobi between visits.
- Check connectivity and equipment before teams leave — devices charged, data loaded, and a tested fallback if the primary connection fails.
- Track the outcome of every planned visit: completed, rescheduled, or not reached, with the reason recorded.
- Flag anything that will stop a visit happening — a vehicle, a document, an unconfirmed appointment — early enough to be fixed.
3. Planning, data and records
- Act as the office point of contact for everything coming in from the field: candidate details, land measurements, GPS coordinates and KYC documents. File them in the shared system the same day they arrive.
- Maintain the master candidate and lead list, and reconcile applications arriving through Slack notifications against the database so the two never diverge.
- Work a missing-information checklist, chasing candidates and field teams for whatever is outstanding.
- Keep a clean record of engagement outcomes — accepted, declined with the reason, or pending — so the funnel can be read at a glance.
- Prepare the weekly field summary for the Friday Ops call: visits made, candidates progressed, and what is blocked.
What “great” looks like
- Candidates keep moving and always know what happens next; drop-off between steps is low.
- Replies are fast, warm, and easy to understand.
- Field teams start each week knowing where they are going, with whom, and in what vehicle — no one waits on a schedule.
- Nothing collected in the field sits uncaptured overnight.
- The lead list is trusted, because it matches what actually happened.
- Candidate data is always handled safely.
- Notes are clear enough for any operator or officer to step in seamlessly.
Required skills & experience
Experience: A background in communication, customer support, community mobilisation, sales/onboarding, scheduling or operations coordination, or a similar people-facing role is an advantage. Suited to someone who enjoys guiding and reassuring people rather than pushing them, and who takes satisfaction in a week that runs to plan.
Technical skills: Comfortable with Slack, WhatsApp, and digital forms; able to guide candidates who are not digital-natives through an online journey step by step; confident building and maintaining a schedule across several teams at once; competent with spreadsheets and trackers; careful and reliable with candidate data and privacy; organised note-taker who can hold many candidates and several field teams in view simultaneously.
Personal attributes: Patient, warm, and genuinely helpful; a clear, plain-language communicator; fluent in both English and Swahili; responsive and dependable in follow-up; discreet and trustworthy with personal data; calm when a plan changes mid-week; comfortable chasing senior colleagues politely and persistently; a team player who knows when to escalate.
