For this month’s employee spotlight, we’re talking to Christina Drum, our Head of CX who leads the Customer Experience Management (CXM) team. Last week Christina celebrated two years at Loris! Christina works in our New York City office and occasionally brings her doodle-mix Sunny to the office (he barks a lot but we love him anyway). We asked her ten questions to learn a little bit more about her and what she does at Loris.
1. Christina, can you tell me what you do at Loris – but explain it to me in the most basic terms, so a 5-year old could understand?
CHRISTINA: Customer Experience Managers are responsible for ensuring that every single Loris client and end user has a smooth onboarding experience and from there, know how to use our technology to achieve outcomes and goals that were previously unthinkable without the help of a powerful machine. We enable a tight and fast feedback loop between our users and our world-class technical team of Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Engineers, ultimately helping to create a better tomorrow that our clients are excited for.
2. What are you most excited about right now, personally or professionally?
CHRISTINA: Personally, we’ll be celebrating a lot of family members’ weddings this year, and my husband and I just recently spent a week in Taiwan with my parents, and he finally had a chance to meet my grandmother!
Professionally, I’m really excited about the thoughtful ways we’re challenging traditional ways of performing quality management work (both manually and ‘automatically’), as well as how we’re infusing generative AI into this space, without adding more stuff & fluff to folks’ already very full plates.
3. Where are you from and where do you live now?
CHRISTINA: I was born in Taichung, Taiwan and at 18-months old, my parents and I moved to southern California. When I was 8, we moved across the country to New Jersey, which is where I now consider myself to be from. College brought me to North Carolina and my first job brought me to Madison, WI and Singapore. When that was over, I moved back to the NYC area! Now that I’m back, I have no plans to leave – the diversity in food, culture, and even nature is unbeatable. 😎
4. Whoa! You’ve really racked up the frequent flier miles! What was the most interesting thing you’ve read or learned recently?
CHRISTINA: One of my favorite places to go in the city is Maison10 – they have a really fun concept around the number 10, and one of the things that they do is hold artist talks for the artists they’re currently showing. At one of the most recent talks, I learned about how perfume is made, how perfume is gendered by marketing, and how to properly layer scents!
5. If you had an entire day to yourself, how would you spend it?
CHRISTINA: At least once a month, I spend substantial time on things that recharge me, such as: curling up with a really good book, walking through new parts of the city with no headphones in so I can really take in all the sights and sounds and appreciate the new storefronts and mourn the familiar ones that are no more, or getting a proper massage or a facial.
6. What has been something you’ve purchased for under $100 that made a difference in your life?
CHRISTINA: Under the desk clamp-on keyboard tray – with how much we sit in tech jobs, having an ergonomic setup is really important for long-term health!
7. Why is Loris the right place for you?
CHRISTINA: It’s very rare to be proud to be working with every single person in a team, much less in an entire company. It’s really special to be part of a team that’s constantly creating something new AND useful.
8. What can one expect as a member of the Customer Experience team?
CHRISTINA: Like most CXMs, Loris CXMs are skilled and equipped to handle a bit of everything and anything on any given day – answering questions from all sorts of users (front line representatives all the way to Chief Customer Officers), showing clients how to use the latest features to achieve a key outcome or workflow, troubleshooting issues, reviewing upcoming product roadmap items, and partnering with Sales and Marketing on client success stories, just to name a few.
9. What was one of your favorite moments here?
CHRISTINA: It’s a toss-up between singing karaoke (first song was “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus) in a Chinatown restaurant when our Israeli team members came for an onsite visit, and every Wednesday when we release new features to Production – getting to see new features and workflows come to life each week is like experiencing Christmas morning, every week.
10. What career advice would you give your 19-year old self?
CHRISTINA: I eventually figured this out, but there is no amount of money or prestige that is worth not learning something new every day or feeling the joy of being part of a team that truly cares about collectively reaching a shared outcome.
