Could you please tell us about your background and your current role?
As a first generation immigrant, I started college at Washington University In St Louis somewhat unready to face the vast number of avenues of study I would encounter. Medicine, finance and law, I assumed, were my only true alternatives when it came to setting myself up for a successful career, as I had poignantly observed of my parents’ experiences back in Kenya and so, I came in with vision tunneled. As such, I spent my freshman and sophomore years pursuing a premedical track before completely pivoting to mathematics and economics. While my new courses were certainly more fulfilling, it wasn’t until my senior year when I took an introductory computer science course that I found myself truly enjoying my education. Fast forward a few years and a number of online computer science courses later and I found myself applying for a Data Analyst position at Idiomatic. The rest is history.
What do you like most about your job?
I count myself blessed to have begun my career at Idiomatic due to the open and deeply collaborative culture here. As an Enablement Engineer, my role allows me endless opportunities to work with and learn from my uber talented colleagues across all departments in a variety of contexts. I have been able to grow and mature professionally in an organic environment and at a pace I doubt I would have achieved anywhere else.
How do you like to spend time outside of work?
When I’m not busy building an automation or helping colleagues troubleshoot some system (mis?)behavior, you will most likely find me at home watching some sporting event (I am a huge fan of basketball, football and soccer so, there’s almost always a game on that I can enjoy), gaming (don’t seem to be growing out of it), reading or at the gym impersonating a fit person.
As a Director of Enablement Engineering, what’s an average work day like for you?
In my view, Enablement Engineering (EE) work can be roughly summarized as; the triaging of technical issues and requests that originate internally or from clients and implementing appropriate solutions or escalating as needed. Sounding broad and unpredictable? It is! What this means for EE is that we are accustomed to getting a number of requests during the course of a day that can vary dramatically in their complexity and urgency. I might have spent yesterday building routine dashboard filters with no meetings, but find that I have to pause that work today, as I attend three impromptu meetings to gather context around reported suspect dashboard volumes. Which could take me until EOD tomorrow to resolve. But the dashboard filters! EE is never boring.
What’s your favorite Idiomatic feature and why?
My favorite Idiomatic feature is that we push our ML predictions to our clients’ CRMs/data warehouses. Idiomatic is a fantastic data enrichment tool, unlike any other on the market today. We can tease out the core issues raised by a customer reaching out to our client for assistance within minutes and share that information with our client before the ticket has even been assigned to an agent. This allows our clients to triage tickets with efficiency, ensuring that the right tickets make it to the right subject matter experts. And while the Idiomatic dashboard is chock-full of features to enable the surfacing of hidden insights at scale, pushing our labels to our clients’ data warehouses allows them further leeway in doing the same, frictionlessly, within existing workflows.
From your perspective, how does Idiomatic solve our customers’ challenges?
Picture one of our clients’ trove of customer feedback data as an array of haystacks in a large field, each with a needle embedded deep within; in my view, Idiomatic is akin to pulsing MagLab’s 100 tesla magnet (very powerful) directly over each haystack simultaneously!
Idiomatic = customer feedback haystack deneedler 🙂
