Meet the Hello Bio Team: Jen Hernandez
Meet the Hello Bio Team! In the first in our series of mini-interviews, Dr Sam Roome chats to Jen Hernández from our Customer Services department.
Jen tells us all about her role at the US office in New Jersey and how she works with our customers, her love of road trips, and how lockdown has impacted her life and work.
Hi Jen! Please kick us off by telling us a bit about your role at Hello Bio, and how long you've been working with us?
I've been at Hello Bio for about seven months... actually, no, eight months! Time flies when you're having fun, I guess! I work in Customer Service in the US office in Princeton, New Jersey. Here, we process all the orders that come to the US and Canada, and we answer all your questions when you call us over the phone.
What do you enjoy most about working at Hello Bio?
What I enjoy most about working at Hello Bio is that it’s a totally new area of work for me. Most of my previous experience has been in finance, banking and investments. Although, for the last 20 years, I have been working in customer service and dealing with the public.
Here, I love everything we're doing. We're supplying scientists and researchers with components that are going to help them with their work. It's really interesting after you’ve sent them a few things, and you get to know what they're working on.
Until COVID, scientific research wasn’t something that you’d see in the news. Most of the time, these scientists are working on things that aren’t being broadcast for everyone to know. The general public don’t really pay much attention to scientific research, but when you work in this job you get to see all this research going on. You get to talk to and support the people that are behind closed doors, doing all this work, and helping everyone to have a better life. So, that's one of the things that I really like about working here – I'm just this little person, but it's helping this chain of bigger things to happen.
How has Coronavirus affected or impacted your work with us?
At the beginning, it definitely impacted us because most universities were closed and hospitals were focusing on helping everybody that was getting sick, not so much on doing research. Though, we never stopped working here! Thankfully, we were prepared and were able to continue operating.
Obviously though, Coronavirus has changed a lot. Particularly when it came to making sure we had the proper PPE to protect ourselves and protect our clients. The way we do things such as handle products has changed too. While, of course, we had safety procedures in place already – now we're even more aware and conscious of how we’re operating.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work? (Both before and after COVID!)
Before Coronavirus, I used to do a lot of road trips. That has changed a lot, seeing as we've spent a lot of time at home over the last six months. I love travelling, whether that’s flying to a different country or going down to Florida, or maybe going to Canada. But I wouldn’t want to go to Florida right now, and I can't go to Canada because the border is closed!
I’m happy that in the past few weeks, I've been able to go out a little bit more. Last week I went to upstate New York, and it was really nice to have a change of scenery. I'm an outdoors person, and I like to go out and do things – so that has changed quite a lot as I’ve had to adjust to being home!
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