MTA's chaos agents
Station ‘ambassadors’ to aid riders
The MTA and the city’s transit union inked a deal Wednesday that will create hundreds of “customer-service ambassador” posts throughout the Big Apple’s busiest subway stations.
The 355 workers will roam station mezzanines and platforms to answer questions about routes, service, MetroCard machines and more, according to Transport Workers Union Local 100.
Station agents can volunteer for the ambassador jobs, which will pay $1 more than their current hourly rates.
The agents’ old positions will be filled by new hires.
The additional workers will cost the agency about $23 million per year in salaries plus benefits, according to the TWU workers’ pay-scale charts.
The MTA will keep station agents at each stop at all times, instead of replacing them with the ambassadors, said TWU officials.
The agency will also still employ platform controllers, whose job is to get riders moving on and off of trains quickly during rush hours.
“Riders will get better customer service and our members will get access to new, betterpaying jobs,” said TWU Local 100 President Tony Utano.
Ambassadors will be equipped with iPhones to look up information for riders and communicate with other workers.
Since there will not be enough ambassador shifts to cover all stations at all times, the MTA will prioritize the busiest stations, including Grand Central, Times Square and Penn Station, agency officials said.
“We’re fundamentally changing our approach to customer service in order to give real-time and better information across the system, and that includes sig- nificant face-to-face customerservice enhancements,” said MTA spokesman Jon Weinstein.
“We’re giving our frontline staff more and better information that they can directly convey to riders.”
The MTA tested out the ambassador jobs at the 53rd Street4th Avenue station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for a couple of days last month.