As a kid, Kristi Crum was always the gadget girl in her family.
She’s all grown up now but Crum is still a gadget girl, only she has a lot more gadgets.
Crum, 37, is president of the South Central Region of Verizon Wireless, which puts her over a four-state area that includes 54 retail stores and more than 200 agent locations. Crum directs sales, operations, marketing and financial performance across Arkansas, Oklahoma and parts of Tennessee and Mississippi.
“You couldn’t ask for a better job,” says Crum.
A native of North Little Rock, Crum attended Hendrix College in Conway as a biology major. She thought she wanted to be a doctor and during college she worked part-time at a local hospital, which opened her eyes to an important fact about herself.
“I just realized I didn’t have that passion for that part of the business,” she says.
Instead, Crum decided to work in a field for which she had consistently shown an aptitude — technology.
While growing up in North Little Rock, Crum had always been the one to help her mother and sister figure out some gadget or another, and she decided to apply her knack for innovative tech when she began working for Alltel, a majority of which was acquired by Verizon in 2008.
“I just found that passion,” Crum says.
Over the years, she has held a wealth of titles but her career progression has basically taken her from analyst to executive, while also bouncing her from New Jersey to northern California.
Crum still has to travel — she could be in Tennessee one day and Mississippi the next — but she was happy when in January her new position, one of 21 such jobs in the country, gave her the chance to make her home state her home base after over five years away.
“I was ready for the next step and the fact that this region came available — some things are meant to be,” says Crum, married and the mother of twin, 8-year-old boys.
While she was working as an Analyst I in operations, her first position at Alltel, a team leader asked Crum in what area she might have ambitions and Crum said “anywhere but product development.”
About four weeks later, Crum found herself in product development, but that turned out to be where the fun is.
Robots and smart helmets are a reality in Crum’s world, and she says the Verizon store in west Little Rock keeps the mainstream phones and tablets toward the back in order to showcase the more unique, innovative items for customers at the front.
Crum has helped land patents around user interfaces to help customers more easily find applications and around cloud-based email synchronization. She envisions a day when networks like Verizon’s LTE connect almost all components and technology through one, handheld device.
Already, she points out, people use their phones for a range of things, from monitoring how much sleep they get to opening their garage doors.
“They’re controlling their entire world from their smartphone,” Crum says.
Still, she points out, at this point only about 2 percent of the devices that could be connected in the world actually are.
Crum mentioned apps either in development or already on the market that can monitor glucose levels in health cases or sense how full trash cans are at a state park to better know when crews and trucks are needed.
There is even an app for helping parents monitor how frequently their children are on their phones. With a touch of a button a mother can see if her child is on his phone at school, when he should be studying, or at night, when he should be sleeping.
Verizon produced a robot, VGo, which is a 100 percent remote controlled telepresence that can be operated by a pad. It can be used for physician-patient monitoring in hospitals or for students who are disabled or too ill to attend school themselves.
“It’s really powerful,” Crum says of both VGo and its impact on people.
With the greater awareness of concussions and head injuries in pro football, Verizon has been working on technology that can allow helmets to monitor the severity of impacts to the head in contact sports.
At one point during a visit in her bright, spacious office, with its view of the Arkansas River and downtown Little Rock, Crum summons advanced solutions architect Rob Lambersson in to demonstrate Verizon’s “panic button.” The button is an unobtrusive, handheld device with GPS capabilities that a user on a remote sales call or other one-on-one meeting can activate to alert multiple contacts — loved ones or 911 for example — should trouble arise.
The device works independently without a phone, connects to cellular services, reports the user’s location by default and has a year’s worth of battery power when fully charged.
In addition to the phones and tablets for which it is known, Crum touts Verizon initiatives focused on healthcare, education and sustainability. Ethical recycling programs, innovative learning schools and battling preventable diseases with handheld technology are just some of Verizon’s efforts in these areas.
“We’re innovating in a space that’s entertaining and fun and we’re innovating in a space that’s going to make an impact,” Crum says.
When it comes to education, Verizon is heavily involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) curriculums, especially for girls.
Crum said that in the near future around 80 percent of the world’s jobs will be technology related. When it comes to filling those jobs, she quotes statistics showing more than 60 percent of female fourth graders are interested in tech, but by the time they are in college fewer than 20 percent pursue a degree in a technology field.
“We know we don’t have enough women in positions of prominence and power,” Crum says, noting the Verizon Foundation’s STEM initiatives like #InspireHerMind and the company’s presence at the recent, Women’s Foundation of Arkansas “Girls of Promise” program at the Clinton Presidential Center.
“These girls had remarkable ideas,” Crum said of the eighth-graders present.
Overall, the Verizon Foundation donated $19 million to STEM curriculums and programs last year, including a “sizeable amount” of money to the Cotter School District.
For Crum, it’s all part of the march toward an interconnected future that started, for her, when she served as her family’s unofficial technology guru.
“You’re going to see a completely different world,” she says.