I was 20 years old and working as a clinical coordinator for a health plan operator in Chicago. My cubicle sat near the main call center that served our customers, which meant I had a front-row seat to the chaos.
A queue board was mounted on the wall. It constantly flipped between red and green. Red meant we were missing our service-level agreements (SLAs): customers were waiting too long, penalties were looming, and managers were scrambling to push more people onto the phones. Green meant we had overshot the mark: too many people staffed, not enough demand, and ballooning payroll costs.
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