Emcom has partnered with New York City Transit (NYCT) over the past dozen years to keep pace with NYCT’s evolving requirements for passenger communications. The initial need was to supplement passengers’ reliance on station agents for assistance, made acute because of plans to close some station booths and curtail the operating hours of others. The initial Emcom EmVista solution was a hybrid system custom-engineered by Emcom to connect a network of analog Customer Assistance Intercoms (CAIs) both to the local station booth and to the NYCT Rail Control Center (RCC), where station supervisors answered calls when the booth was unavailable or conferenced in when additional assistance was necessary.
Emcom upgraded the system as part of NYCT’s Help Point Intercom (HPI) initiative, a network of nearly 4,000 third party two-button VoIP kiosks. The Emcom EmVista upgrade included routing HPI calls initiated with the Information button to NYCT’s Transit Information Center (TIC) and calls initiated with the Emergency button to the RCC, allowing easy transfer between the two in case of mistakes. In addition, Emcom created a set of custom Excel reports for the TIC to inform staffing.
