Alfonso Herrada
Operations leader who builds the operation that serves the customer and the capacity model underneath it. At Figo Pet Insurance, joined the CX team as its eighth member and grew the support organization past thirty through a $250M acquisition; outside reviewers rated the service best-in-category (Reviews.com Best Overall 2019, Trustpilot 9.1). Ran the operation's analytics on raw telephony data and rebuilt its workforce and scheduling model. At Chicago Public Schools, specified the coverage platform for a 500+ school district, directed the vendor build, then extended the system in-house; inquiries fell 30% and placements ran 40% faster.
The record, by engagement.
| Engagement | Role | Outcome | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Analytic Gator Strategy and operations consulting | Strategy and Support Operations · Founder & Principal | Runs day-to-day operations on Claude-native systems built and operated solo. Rainmaker, a human-in-the-loop agent system, took first place among the program's capstones at DataExpert.io. A paid engagement building an operating system for a teacher's classroom is in delivery. A second engagement is in audit, building AI into a home-services company's sales funnel, using the Rainmaker concept. | 2022–present |
| Chicago Public Schools Department of Principal Quality · 500+ schools | Business Operations Analyst & Team Coordinator | Specified the coverage system, directed the 5-to-7-person vendor build, then extended it in-house. Inquiries fell 30%. School-leader placement ran 40% faster on request-to-fill dates. Contributed to Department of Principal Quality's 88% responsiveness rating on the Chicago Public Education Fund Principals Survey, second of every CPS department against a 69% district average. | 2024–2026 |
| Figo Pet Insurance Insurtech · $250M acquisition | Customer Experience Operations Manager · Interim Director of Customer Experience | Joined the CX team as its 8th member and built the support organization past 30 through the acquisition, at 10,000+ monthly contacts. Outside reviewers rated the service best-in-category (Reviews.com Best Overall 2019, Trustpilot 9.1). Escalations cut 30% in six weeks. New-hire ramp cut from 9 weeks to 6. | 2018–2021 |
| JPMorgan Chase Second-largest branch in the country | Business Banking Support Operations Manager | Grew business banking revenue 15% and NPS 10% over five years. A qualification framework cut low-fit pursuit time across the 16-person business banking team and lifted conversion 30% in 12 months. | 2011–2016 |
| AT&T Consumer and business retail | Customer Support and Sales Operations Manager | Coached the 10-person team from #25 of all Illinois AT&T stores to the top 5 within 12 months. Annual revenue up 15% on structured weekly coaching. | 2009–2011 |
| Meso America Technical Services Telecom EF&I for carrier central offices | Business Operations and Strategy Manager | Led 20-40 people across warehouse, installer crews, and supervisors. ISO 9001 certification across 4 departments cut non-conformance 40%. Demand forecasting and bulk purchasing cut procurement costs roughly 10%. | 2001–2009 |
How the work gets done.
Where AI enters the operation, and where it stays out.
Alfonso runs his own day-to-day operations, career, content, and family care, on Claude-native systems he built and operates solo, with human gates throughout. The Desk, the container his agent systems run in, is private, and a walkthrough is available on request. Career Arc, the record of his working life inside it, is what the résumé on this page was written from. Every claim on it traces to evidence on file. It is the same pattern he would build for a department.
Recourse, a human-in-the-loop agent system for consumer-complaint operations, is his capstone build for DataExpert.io's Databricks AI Data Engineer Boot Camp. It runs on 17,355,295 public CFPB complaints, with the arrival timing replayed and labelled as a replay, and a person approves every reply before anything resolves. There is a public sandbox that needs no login. Capstone submitted; final grade and certificate pending.
Rainmaker, a human-in-the-loop agent system from the same practice, took first place among the program's capstones in the 2026 DataExpert.io competition and earned the founder's recommendation. A paid engagement building an operating system for a teacher's classroom is in delivery. A second engagement is in audit, building AI into a home-services company's sales funnel, using the Rainmaker concept. A walkthrough of Rainmaker is available on request.
The systems come with the operating judgment to match. A career of running support operations informs where AI agents belong, where deflection is real, and where a human gate is non-negotiable.
Honest about where I add value, and where I don't.
Strong fit if
- You need the operation built or rebuilt. I joined a CX team as its 8th member and built it past 30. I walked into a five-team shared inbox and left behind a coverage platform a district runs on.
- You are scaling through an inflection point. I built a support organization past 30 through a $250M acquisition, and absorbed three simultaneous pressures: a COVID-era demand surge, a rolling repricing wave, and a full policy-generation migration off an underwriter switch.
- Your operations run on tribal knowledge and scattered spreadsheets. That is exactly where the CPS build started.
- You are deciding what AI should do in your operation. I make that call daily in my own systems and right now for a client.
- Spanish-speaking customers or teams are part of the picture. Both languages are native for me.
Probably not a fit if
- You need a pure individual-contributor analyst. The leadership would go unused.
- The system already exists and needs steady-state maintenance. I will keep finding things to improve, and that would frustrate us both.
- You want the tooling operated exactly as configured, with no room to change the design.
- The problem is fully specified. I add the most while the question is still being worked out: scoping, elicitation, deciding what gets built.
Let's talk.
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