MBTA Launches New Customer Service Dept.

This story, written by Christina Wallace, appeared in the Metro Boston on Wednesday, February 14, 2007.

In an effort to appease cranky riders and streamline the complaint process, the MBTA this month will open a centralized customer service department that will include bilingual employees, more manpower and speedier response times, according to T officials.

The initiative has been in the works for the past several months and training for the new department began this week, according to Carla Howze, director of the new customer support department, during a recent presentation to the MBTA Board of Directors.

"The myriad customer service functions will be located within one office, rather than spread across multiple offices and buildings across the city," Howze said. "Responses to customer concerns will be timely, accurate and consistent."

Before this initiative, customer concerns were bounced to different areas of the T, causing frustration at times among riders who never received a response or received different answers from different departments.

"It has led to some confusion and certainly some aggravation on the part of some of our customers," said MBTA General Manager Daniel Grabauskas. "They sometimes felt they were being thrown from department to department, or in some cases not given the right answer."

This new department will change that, he said.

The T hired 25 customer service representatives, 11of which speak other languages, including Spanish and Cantonese. The centralized office will allow T employees to closely track consistent problems on specific lines and troubleshoot those issues, according to the T. New technology, which will be put in place next month, will make it possible for representatives to easily track whether a customer has been contacted back on a complaint or concern.

The T will continue the long-standing "Write to the Top" complaint system but, according to Grabauskas, customers will get a better, more timely response.

"We are still going to have "Write to the Top," but we never really followed it as closely as we should have to make sure concerns were answered," he said. "We want to make sure that a person who writes or calls in gets the right information and in a timely fashion, and that they get it once."

Howze is credited with cleaning up the customer service department at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, where she served under Grabauskas before his tenure at the T.