The American Public Transportation Association named York Region Transit employee Sky-Marie Simon as the 2016 APTA Call Center Challenge winner. Simon was announced as the winner at the March 1 competition, which was held at the APTA Marketing & Communications Workshop in Phoenix, Arizona.
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 60 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 seven finalists for the final competition.
The final competition took place in front of a live audience and were judged by three APTA member judges. The seven 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 six finalists were:
- Melissa Barna, Metro Regional Transit Authority, Akron, Ohio
- Tony Craig, Dallas Area Rapid Transit, Dallas, Texas
- Spencer Eliacin, StarMetro, Tallahassee, Florida
- Helen James, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Washington, D.C.
- Angel Marinich, Greater Peoria Mass Transit Disrict, Peoria, Illinois
- Billy Smith, TriMet, Portland, Oregon
