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Award-winning Director of Customer Experience

Lorena Lovric

I design customer experience as a system — so the machinery absorbs the friction, and people get to lead with judgment.

Director of Customer Experience at Aterian, where I run a global, multi-brand operation across seven brands and six marketplaces. My work sits where CX, AI and business operations meet: building things that hold up under pressure without losing the human on either end.

Lorena Lovric laughing, in a red blouse against a white studio background

Impact in numbers

65%

Reduction in CX technology cost of ownership

25%

Lower handle time from an LLM-powered email copilot

+82

Employee Net Promoter Score across the CX team

3,000+

SKUs consolidated into an AI-structured knowledge base

Recognition

Industry awards

Winner · 2025

Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award

For architecting an AI-powered CX ecosystem on Genesys Cloud that unified channels, elevated the agent experience, and scaled global operations.

Read the announcement (opens in a new tab)
Lorena Lovric on stage holding the Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award, with three colleagues
Accepting the 2025 Orchestrators Innovation Award at Genesys Xperience.
  • 2026 Finalist — Orchestrators Innovation Awards, CX Leader
  • 2026 Finalist — Orchestrators Innovation Awards, Agent category
  • 2026 Genesys Maestro — Orchestrators community
  • 2026 Nominee — Golden Cart Awards
  • 2026 Judge — Genesys Customer Innovation Awards
  • 2026 Member — Women in CX Inner Circle
Black and white studio portrait of Lorena Lovric

About

Delegate tasks to AI. Don't delegate humanity.

I started on the contact centre frontline — night shifts, around sixty calls a shift — and it is still my favourite job I have ever had. Not because of the work, but because of the people and the culture we built around it. I have since worked every role from agent to executive leadership, and that first one is the lens I still design from.

Today I lead customer experience at Aterian — three CX leaders, fifteen frontline agents, seven brands, and customers arriving from Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Temu, Shein and Shopify. More than 70% of it lands as email and marketplace messages: asynchronous, high-volume, emotionally loaded, and the hardest kind of conversation to automate well.

I have stayed unapologetically agent-centric throughout. Technology should never replace people; it should create the space for them to deliver better experiences. Which means bringing frontline teams in from the start rather than after the decisions are made — they understand customer conversations in context, and they will spot what a specification cannot.

It also means being disciplined about what efficiency is for. When automation gave my team time back, I did not raise the targets. That time went into better conversations instead of simply more of them.

I think of CX as the heart of an organisation — the function that pumps the voice of the customer through every other department. Technology is the brain. Neither does much alone, and the job of experience orchestration is to keep them connected.

Currently
Director of Customer Experience, Aterian
Team
3 CX leaders, 15 agents, four continents
Focus
Experience orchestration, AI adoption, WEM strategy
Reach
Philippines, United States, Europe & China

Principles

“Happy agents equal happy customers.”

Employee experience and customer experience cannot be separated — every interaction is shaped by how supported and trusted the person delivering it feels.

“Clean up your house before you bring AI.”

Applied to a fragmented organisation, AI just automates the mess. Simplify the systems and remove the friction first.

“Your agent shouldn't be your first line of defence. They should be your first line of innovation.”

The people who meet customer friction daily are best placed to see where automation and simplification actually belong.

“Scale empathy on both fronts.”

Not by making machines sound human, but by removing enough operational burden that people have the room to be. Then solve the first problem well, and move on to the next.

The work

Four things worth telling

Not a list of responsibilities. The actual problems, what got built, and what changed.

01

The foundation

Two platforms, 3,000 products, one rebuild

65% lower tech TCO

Aterian sells more than 3,000 products across seven brands and six marketplaces. Support ran on two separate systems — and the gap between them was where context disappeared.

The problem

Zendesk handled marketplace buyer messages, Genesys handled everything else. Agents switched between them and lost context in the gap. Knowledge lived in wikis, spreadsheets and scattered documentation. There was no unified reporting. And voice support, the thing customers asked for most loudly in negative reviews, was simply out of reach.

What I built

I retired Zendesk and migrated every channel — including Amazon buyer messages — into Genesys Cloud. Then we used our own AI model to parse 3,000-plus product manuals into structured, searchable FAQs, and embedded them where agents and customers actually are.

The piece I'm proudest of is the email copilot. It reads the entire historical thread, not just the last message, pulls order and warranty data through API integrations, and drafts a reply tuned to that brand, that product and that customer's tone. The agent reviews it and sends. Every accept, edit and rejection feeds back into our BI dashboards.

What changed

Technology cost of ownership
65%Lower technology cost of ownership
Voice support
VoiceLaunched with zero incremental headcount
Containment
40–45%Interactions contained with minimal agent edits
Genesys didn't just give us a tool. It gave us a canvas.

02

Under pressure

194,400 customers, and nobody outsourced

Run in-house, no added headcount

A CPSC-mandated product recall is where most support operations either buckle or get handed to an external BPO at six-figure cost. We ran the entire thing ourselves.

The conviction

It was architectural: the system should absorb the friction, so our people can lead with judgment. In a demanding recall, precision is the highest form of respect — and the fastest way to disrespect a worried customer is to make an agent improvise.

What I built

Customer submissions flowed into Genesys as structured interactions. Architect flows extracted and validated order data in real time. Fraud logic caught duplicate claims, reused images and increasingly creative AI-generated submissions — and diverted them into a separate workflow before they ever reached a queue.

What changed

Interaction volume
+143%Increase in interaction volume absorbed
Average handle time
−34%Reduction in average handle time
Service level
80%+SLA held throughout the surge

The part I'd rather talk about is the Recall Fiesta — gamified badges like Accuracy Master and Connection Catalyst that turned a grinding compliance event into something the team wanted to win. Productivity rose 77% in the first month. Agent satisfaction reached 90%.

03

From reaction to detection

Thirteen days down to six

54% faster resolution

Safety signals arrived buried inside ordinary customer emails — and finding them was somebody's manual job.

The problem

A product overheating, a malfunction, an injury. Detection was manual, escalation was inconsistent, and an investigation averaged thirteen days — triggering a cross-functional scramble every time: what happened, did we miss earlier signals, who owns this across regions and time zones.

What I built

I moved detection into the architecture. AI scanning now runs inside Genesys Architect flows, layered with data tables and web service actions, reading unstructured conversations for risk in real time. A hit fires a trigger, notifies stakeholders across CX, Product, Legal, Compliance and Engineering, and opens a WorkItem that tracks the case to closure.

We then wired Genesys data into Claude through APIs, so leadership can ask direct questions about emerging risks and trends and get an answer immediately, rather than waiting on a report.

What changed

Resolution time
13 → 6Days to resolve a safety case
Detection
Real-timeRisk detection inside the orchestration layer
Coverage
4Regions coordinated on one workflow

The more important change is that nobody has to go looking any more. The team acts instead of hunting.

04

The team

Happy agents create happy customers

+82 eNPS

The earliest sign that orchestration is working shows up in the team, not the dashboard. By the time negative customer feedback arrives, you are already late.

How the team runs

Every day opens with a huddle — somewhere to get grounded before the first interaction, share a win, flag a problem. Fridays are workshops, where I bring in leaders from Product, Finance and Operations to explain how their functions actually work. My theory is that CX is the best training ground in the company, and exposure to other disciplines is what turns a strong agent into a well-rounded operator.

It works. People have used those Fridays to move into IT, Finance, Product and Revenue roles. Agents run sessions themselves, teaching things that don't live in any documentation. Every leader on my team now holds at least one Genesys certification — seven across the group.

Why it matters

“A customer wrote to say that during their divorce settlement, one of our products was listed on the official home inventory. The message was lighthearted — but it told us this wasn't just a product to them. Shortly after, one of my agents messaged me: ‘I want to do something for this customer that will brighten their day.’

That instinct wasn't tied to a KPI. It wasn't a required action. I backed it — and then rebuilt QA around tone, understanding and connection rather than resolution alone.

What changed

Quality assurance
96%Overall QA performance
Employee Net Promoter Score
+82Employee Net Promoter Score
Certifications
7Genesys certifications across CX leadership

But the real difference wasn't in the metrics. It was that agents stopped simply resolving interactions and started creating moments customers remember. That only happens when people feel trusted enough to care.

Career

The short version

  1. Director of Customer Experience

    Remote · Mar 2021 – Present

    Aterian, Inc.

    Architect of Aterian's enterprise CX platform on Genesys Cloud. Global WEM strategy across EU, Asia and LATAM; CX through multiple M&A events; CX → Product → Supply Chain feedback pipelines. Reports to the CRO & CEO.

  2. Director of Customer Service

    Remote · Jan 2020 – Mar 2021

    SmashCommerce

    Implemented the Gorgias CX platform, cut average handle time 36%, and lifted CSAT to 97% across global Amazon brands. Built the company's first WFM and QA structures, and led a multi-marketplace product recall with no additional headcount. Reported to the CEO.

  3. Agent & QA Specialist

    Zagreb, Croatia · 2017 – 2020

    HelloFresh

    QA, coaching, training and escalation programmes for the US and UK markets. Promoted twice. Where the front-line lens came from.

CX systems

Genesys CloudZendeskFive9 KustomerIntercomGorgias ServiceNow

AI & automation

LLM copilotsOrchestration Architect flowsIntent classification Knowledge engineering

Operations & data

WEMWFMForecasting SQLPower BIGamification

Marketplaces

AmazonWalmartTemu SheinMiraklWayfair ShopifyeBay

Credentials

  • Genesys Cloud CX: Architect · Mar 2026
  • Genesys Cloud CX: Professional · Nov 2025
  • Harvard Extension School · ALM, Finance (2025–present)
  • University of Zagreb · BA, Finance & Accounting

Speaking & media

On stage and in print

Panels, podcasts and features on experience orchestration, responsible AI, and what it takes to lead CX teams through change.

Lorena Lovric speaking into a microphone on a panel at the Women in CX Unconference
Lorena Lovric answering a question on a conference panel
Lorena Lovric smiling beside a fellow panellist during a conference session
Lorena Lovric framed on a broadcast camera monitor while speaking on stage

Selected engagements

  • Experience Orchestration: Turning AI, Data and Customer Insight into Responsible Action

    Women in CX — webinar

  • Authentic Leadership in the Age of AI: Leading with Clarity, Courage and Responsibility

    International Women's Day panel — Women in CX × Genesys

  • Accelerating Responsible Action

    Women in CX Unconference, sponsored by Kantar

  • CX roundtable on AI, empathy and the human agent

    UJET.cx × Women in CX

Contact

Let's talk customer experience

Open to speaking invitations, advisory conversations, and connecting with people building the next generation of CX.