The American Public Transportation Association named Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority employee Mallory Wright as the 2018 APTA Call Center Challenge winner. Wright was announced as the winner at the February 27 competition, which was held at the APTA Marketing & Communications Workshop in San Francisco, California.
The Call Center Challenge recognizes the best of transit call center personnel by testing their customer service and problem-solving skills, highlighting the importance of customer service within transportation call centers.
The annual competition is open to APTA member public transportation call center personnel. Each transit system can nominate one call center operator participant. This year nearly 50 phone customer service representatives entered the challenge. Those candidates participated in a pre-selection phone test and were asked to resolve two common customer call center inquiries. After the preliminary round, a panel of APTA member judges selected five finalists for the final competition.
The final competition took place in front of a live audience, hosted by Tom Costello, instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and previously chief operating officer at the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District. The finalists were judged by three APTA member judges, Russ Frank, vice president Customer Service, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Cindy Medford, manager of Customer Service, Utah Transit Authority, and Mark Bariglio, Director Customer Service Department, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
The five finalists were challenged with three real-life call center scenarios. Each participant received the same first scenario, a basic call for information. The following two scenarios were increasingly challenging and were randomly determined ahead of time.
The other finalists were:
- Alyssa Lujan, Orange County Transportation Authority, Orange, California
- Edith Randle, Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, St. Petersburg, Florida
- Jamie Smothers, Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet), Portland, Oregon
- Jennifer Young, Virginia Railway Express (VRE), Alexandria, Virginia
