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Behavior Heuristics

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Over the summer of my junior year of college, I interned for Automated Health Services in the Human Resources Department. During my time there, they were doing a lot of hiring for the call center. The call center was in charge of both incoming and outgoing calls, for those that needed questions answered regarding Medicare recipients, for example the closes doctor’s offices. As Automated Health Services won more and more contracts with different government programs for different states, the call center expanded. They decided they needed to hire more customer service representatives bilingual in Spanish. Several were hired in the next month. It did not take long before we noticed the ratio of bilingual representatives to callers. Most, spent the day speaking English with very little translation needed. The director of human resources had me investigate the situation. I was to determine why we had a need for bilingual representatives, more specifically Spanish representatives if the call mass was not evening out. I realized that the manager that had made this decision had based it upon two behavioral heuristics. She first chose Spanish because of how many employees of Spanish ethnicity worked there. When she heard representatives speaking in Spanish to each other, she assumed they were on calls. This is an example availability heuristic. She made this call based off of more easily available information. She did not perform an investigation. The second behavior heuristic is that of anchoring. That particular week when we were determining the qualifications for new hires, we had received an abnormal amount of calls from Spanish speaking citizens. This was front loaded because if you looked at the calls from the past weeks, due to our newest contract we actually had a lot more polish speaking callers. The call center manager had failed to look at numbers throughout

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