- One Word to Describe Yourself: Inquisitive
- Alma Mater: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Favorite Book: “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely & “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
- Favorite TV Show: “RuPaul’s Drag Race”
- Favorite Movie: “10 Things I Hate About You”
- Favorite Hobby: Walking her dog while listening to podcasts
- Fun Fact: Her original college major was music education; to the delight of her parents, she changed it four more times
- Favorite Transit System (outside of the one they work for): Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority –Her sister lives in Boston and she loves riding this legacy system. “The area is jam-packed with character and it’s fun to pop out of the train station in Sommerville after just leaving Cambridge.”
Amy Snyder began her career at MTD by chance when she had squandered away her spring semester of junior year helping plan her brother’s bar mitzvah and MTD’s was the only internship where the deadline hadn’t yet passed.
While there, she fell in love with the purpose of public transportation and with the agency itself.
Being the size MTD is, she said it is big enough they’re doing exciting things but small enough where you can do a lot of different things and since coming onboard, she has worked up the ranks to customer service director.
Over the past decade she has led a crucial leadership role within the organization, revamping systems and expanding her job responsibilities. When she did social media, she was the mouthpiece for everything that was going on at the agency but in the role she’s in now, she has the opportunity to work on procedures that impact multiple departments.
One of the things Snyder did was overhauling and centralizing MTD’s lost and found procedure across the organization, which has improved return rate to owners by 30 percent.
Another district-wide initiative was that she reassessed the call system and moved MTD to an automatic call distribution system, which puts a more professional voice and face to the organization and allows MTD to measure call volumes, optimize staffing, and track employee responsiveness and effectiveness.
MTD is working toward applying for ISO 9001 Quality Management System certification in 2018 and Snyder serves as the management representative. This certification would complement MTD’s ISO 14001 certification, which Snyder also played a significant role. As part of the implementation team for the ISO 14001 certification, she went to Virginia Tech once a quarter, doing homework in between. As a large aspect of the standards is communication and documentation, she was overseeing the continuity of documents across departments and taking care of how they were going to communicate internally and externally about the standard, once MTD received certification.
Snyder has been involved in the national scene as a graduate of the American Public Transportation Association’s Emerging Leaders Program in 2016 and has been an active member of its Marketing & Communications Committee. She currently serves as secretary and incoming vice chair and has been the conference planning chair for 2016, 2017 and 2018. Being involved as provided perspectives from agencies of varying size and from different departments, backgrounds and areas of expertise.
“Before when I did social media I was the mouthpiece for everything that was going on here but now in the role I’m in I get to work on procedures that impact a lot of departments.”
“It’s those entire district wide projects that are really a lot of fun for me. I’m really proud of when everybody’s identified this is a bugaboo and we need to fix it but it’s so hard to find the resources to do, so I’m put in a position where I’ve been able to tackle some of these bugaboos … when you turn something around, there’s a lot to be proud of there.”
“I get the opportunity to help our front line cope with taking complaints … We have people who are depending on us every single day. I enjoy that part of my job, to remind our employees to continue to be of service … to our passengers, which is our reason to be here.”
