Meet the Team

Lori Love
Senior Director, Customer Solutions

When asked if she likes her job, Lori Love seems almost incredulous. With raised eyebrows she says, “I came here for this job… I love it.”

With a surname like Love, it’s not surprising that the word she most often uses to describe her work—and that of her colleagues at Yahoo! Search Marketing—is “passion.”

“I have a great group of people who have a lot of passion,” says Love, who has been with Yahoo! Search Marketing (and its former incarnation, Overture) for about five years. “We’ve got smart, energetic people who really want to do the right thing for the advertiser. You can’t be here if that’s not where you passion is.”

Love manages more than 100 customer solutions specialists in Burbank, California and Hillsboro, Oregon. “These are the first contact centers I’ve been in where the reps are college degreed,” she says. “This is not your normal vintage. Folks here are very savvy, very passionate, very able and very aggressive on behalf of their customers.”

Besides passion and smarts, nimbleness is the key to creating a great customer solutions team in a fast-moving, highly technological, and highly competitive market. Love’s previous experience was in online banking, a world that, she says, has “regulations, structure and well defined steps.” Here, though, the emphasis is on service that involves turn-on-a-dime innovation against new releases that happen as often as every two weeks. It’s the kind of challenge managers like Love relish. 

“In banking you build it and you maintain it because everyone is coming in and telling you how it needs to be run,” she says, “but I’m not a maintenance girl. I like to keep building.”

But Love also has passions outside her work at Yahoo! She’s an animal lover who has rescued two “pound puppies”—both Corgi mixes—from local animal shelters. “Always save a life when you can,” she says with a smile. She’s even fond of the tarantulas she would encounter when hiking on Mount Diablo in Northern California before moving south. Love is also an experienced diver who taught scuba for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with her husband, “Smokey” Love. The two still scuba now and then. But Smokey’s vocation—making custom golf clubs—often takes them out to the links.

Lori’s broad experiences working with people, with animals and in dangerous environments, have positively helped shape her approach to the business. It’s definitely got a lot to do with putting trust in others and being able to count on them. “We have hundreds of thousands of advertisers in the U.S., all with various levels of expertise, needs, budgets and so forth,” she says. “How do you make sure that each of these businesses can be successful? You’ve got to have smart, focused, dedicated people—or you can’t pull it off.”

—Michael Mattis