Customer Service Week: Brett McDavid, Systems Administrator

Next Ride, Trip Planner, Service Alert Management System, Genesys Cloud and Square Point-of-Sale are just some of the complex systems Customer Care uses to keep RTD’s customers moving. With so many different systems in play, it takes a superhero to ensure they all stay up and running. Luckily, Systems Administrator Brett McDavid is ready at a moment’s notice to jump in and save the day.

McDavid, raised in Colorado, joined RTD in 2013 as a systems administrator after spending 20 years in Tampa, Florida, nine of which were working for Coca-Cola. He started by providing desktop support for the company’s Information Technology team, working his way up to becoming an administrator for the call center. After a stint as a call center administrator, he was promoted to business analyst, where he stayed until moving back to Colorado for his two children, who attend college at Oregon State and the University of Connecticut.

After joining RTD, McDavid was tasked with building a trip planner, an application allowing customers to enter their destinations and see which RTD services they would need to take to arrive by a specified time. This trip planner wouldn’t be just for customers: A separate version was built for Customer Care employees to help customers plan trips in greater detail.

“We combined three old trip planners into one,” McDavid said.

He teamed up with Information Technology to build the new Trip Planner in-house using open-source code, released later in 2013.

After the success of Trip Planner’s implementation, McDavid turned his attention to conducting the biggest upgrade the Telephone Information Center (TIC) ever had: creating a cloud-based call management system that eliminates the need for on-site hardware and copper-wire telephones.

“The TIC used to operate via hard-wired equipment at District Shops,” McDavid said. “This new system, called Genesys Cloud, allows calls to be handled entirely via the internet.”

“It’s a cloud system, so there’s no real hardware for us to worry about,” he explained. “We don’t have to worry about servers, it can be accessed anywhere and there’s no need to be logged into RTD’s network to access it.”

Oddly enough, McDavid’s experience at Coca-Cola prepared him for this transition.

“When I was at Coca-Cola, we used an Avaya system, the same we used here at RTD,” he said. “We moved over to Cisco, a cloud-based system very similar to Genesys.”

McDavid compared the two experiences and said that the migration to Genesys Cloud was much easier than the migration to Cisco at Coca-Cola.

In late 2018, RTD’s Customer Care Division moved into a new facility at 711 W. 31st Ave. in Denver, named the 711 building, alongside N Line Commuter Rail Transportation and the Revenue Systems Group. This new facility gave all TIC employees their own cubicle instead of having to share workspaces as they had at District Shops. Of course, moving the entirety of Customer Care to a new facility introduced many new challenges.

“The main thing for me was making sure the phone system was going to work,” McDavid said.

“We started Genesys Cloud back at District Shops, and it had its own series of challenges and teething issues at first,” McDavid said. “Coming over to the 711 building with new systems and everyone in their own desks required us to make sure that every workspace was powered up and connected to Genesys, the internet and the other systems we need to operate.”

McDavid’s role isn’t limited to building systems. Every system requires significant upkeep to ensure the most up-to-date information is shared with Customer Care’s employees and RTD’s customers.

“Maintenance depends on the platform or service,” he said. “Since Genesys Cloud is a third-party application, they do their own server maintenance. For our Trip Planner, that requires us to act when issues arise.”

“Sometimes, a customer will call in and say that the Trip Planner is displaying the wrong stop information due to a moved stop or a detour,” McDavid said. “We’ll need to collaborate with our Geographic Information Systems team to update the Trip Planner with the correct location data to provide customers with updated stop locations, then reach out to Google and have them update it on their end.”

Keeping customers informed around the clock is a herculean task that involves dozens of employees. McDavid’s work is a major part of the glue that holds it all together.