Title: Digital Customer Experience Specialist
Location: Jersey City, NJ - Onsite
Duration: 3 years
Position Overview
The Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH) is seeking an experienced Digital Customer Experience Specialist (DCX Specialist) to support its Passenger Service & Customer Experience operations. This is considerably more operational than a traditional social media or marketing position.
The specialist will serve as one of PATH's real-time digital connections to the traveling public, monitoring and responding to customers across social media, web correspondence and other digital channels while maintaining awareness of PATH service conditions and emerging customer issues.
The individual will respond to routine travel questions and customer concerns, but must also be capable of operating effectively during train delays, service disruptions, emergencies, severe weather, planned service changes and other high-volume events. PATH specifically requires customer communications and digital engagement to contribute to a superior travel experience.
This person therefore needs to be part customer-service professional, social-media community manager, communications specialist, social-listening analyst and transit incident communicator.
Key Responsibilities
The Digital Customer Experience Specialist will:
- Monitor PATH social media feeds, website correspondence and other virtual customer channels, including Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Salesforce and other platforms used by PATH.
- Engage directly with PATH riders and respond to customer questions, concerns, complaints and travel-related issues in a friendly, professional and accurate manner.
- Meet PATH's customer-experience service standard requiring incoming social posts to be acknowledged, answered or appropriately closed within 20 minutes during live-monitoring hours.
- Maintain accurate tracking of customer correspondence through completion and closure.
- Track sensitive correspondence that has been escalated internally or externally, including Title VI and ADA-related civil-rights complaints.
- Produce daily shift reports summarizing digital activity, significant conversations, emerging issues and matters requiring management awareness.
- Monitor social channels in real time to identify incidents, emerging events, service issues, unsafe conditions and other developments affecting PATH customers.
- Immediately escalate relevant operational issues to PATH personnel.
- Alert PATH Train Control Center personnel to emergencies or unsafe conditions identified through digital channels within 10 minutes during live-monitoring hours.
- Provide real-time customer communications during service disruptions, delays, emergencies and weather events.
- Under PATH Management direction, prepare and issue alerts and advisories concerning service changes, disruptions, closures and other conditions affecting PATH travel.
- Serve as a public-facing representative of PATH by providing thoughtful, accurate, clear and customer-focused communications consistent with Port Authority/PATH standards.
- Support customer-facing website content updates and review proposed changes for accuracy, branding and communications standards.
- Assist with development of social media content, including written, graphic and video content.
- Develop engaging customer-facing social posts and special promotions as directed.
- Provide comprehensive handoffs to incoming DCX Specialists at shift changes to maintain operational continuity.
- Continuously refine customer-response templates and protocols based on customer needs, recurring questions and emerging platform trends.
Social Listening & Customer Intelligence
This is an important part of the job that recruiters should not overlook.
The specialist will use PATH's existing Hootsuite and Brandwatch capabilities to monitor and analyze customer sentiment and feedback beyond PATH's owned social channels.
This includes customer conversations and reviews appearing on sources such as:
Google Maps, Reddit, Yelp and other online forums/platforms.
The individual must be able to move beyond simply reading comments and identify:
- Recurring rider complaints
- Emerging customer-service issues
- Customer sentiment
- Operational pain points
- Trending topics
- Opportunities for service/process improvement
- Opportunities to improve customer engagement
- Issues requiring management attention
PATH expects the specialist to analyze customer interactions and community conversations and translate those findings into useful information for management.
Mandatory Qualifications
Recruiters should treat the following as hard requirements unless PATH provides clarification otherwise:
Education
Bachelor's degree in:
- Digital Communications
- Marketing
- Communications
- Or a closely related field
Experience
Minimum 3 years of customer service experience that includes direct engagement with customers through social media platforms.
This should be genuine customer engagement experience—not simply someone who has scheduled corporate marketing posts.
Required Technology Experience
Candidates must demonstrate experience with:
Social Media Management
- Hootsuite or comparable enterprise social-media management platform
CRM
- Salesforce or comparable customer relationship management/customer-service platform
Social Listening
- Brandwatch or comparable social-listening/consumer-intelligence platform
PATH expressly identifies experience with all three technology categories.
Writing
Proven ability to produce:
- Short-form digital/social copy
- Long-form written communications
The candidate needs excellent grammar, editing and concise writing skills because communications may be issued publicly and sometimes during rapidly changing operational situations.
Required Analytical Skills
Candidates must have demonstrated experience analyzing customer interactions and online/community conversations to identify:
- Patterns
- Recurring issues
- Trends
- Customer concerns
- Opportunities for operational/process improvements
- Opportunities for improved customer engagement
This is an important differentiator between a DCX Specialist and a basic social media/customer-service representative.
Critical Soft Skills
- Excellent judgment – Knows what can be answered immediately versus what must be escalated.
- Calm under pressure – Can communicate professionally while customers are frustrated during delays, cancellations, weather or emergencies.
- Empathy – Handles rider complaints sensitively without becoming defensive.
- Situational awareness – Can monitor several information streams simultaneously and recognize when an online comment may indicate a legitimate operational or safety issue.
- Strong written communication – Can quickly transform operational information into clear, concise customer-facing language.
- Problem solving – Does not simply acknowledge complaints; works to identify the correct information, resolution or escalation path.
- Attention to detail – Particularly important when communicating service information to thousands of travelers.
- Professional discretion – Comfortable dealing with complaints, sensitive correspondence and potentially regulated civil-rights matters.
- Multitasking – Able to simultaneously monitor social media, CRM activity, customer correspondence and operational developments.
- Collaboration – Comfortable coordinating with PATH Management, Train Control Center personnel, operational staff and Port Authority communications/media personnel.
- Shift-handoff discipline – Clearly documents open issues and transfers information to the next specialist.
- SOP-driven independence – Able to operate independently within established Standard Operating Procedures. PATH specifically identifies this ability as required.
- High-Pressure / Crisis Communications Experience - Recruiters should give significant preference to candidates who have handled live operational disruptions. PATH specifically lists multitasking and problem-solving under high-pressure situations such as emergencies and service disruptions as desirable.
Strong candidates may come from:
Public Transit / Transportation | Airlines / Airports | Rail | Emergency Communications | Government/Public Agencies | Utilities | Hospitality/Travel | Large Venue Operations | Healthcare Customer Communications | Telecom | High-volume Consumer Services
For example, someone who has managed an airline's social channels during cancellations or a transit agency's customer communications during a service outage may be substantially stronger than a candidate who has only managed scheduled marketing campaigns.
Good-to-Have Skills
Beyond the mandatory requirements, I would target candidates with:
- Public transportation or passenger-service experience
- Government/public-agency communications experience
- Crisis communications
- Emergency communications
- Transportation disruption communications
- High-volume social customer care
- Social media escalation management
- Digital community management
- Customer sentiment analysis
- Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) programs
- Customer journey/customer experience analytics
- Contact-center/customer-care experience
- Salesforce Service Cloud
- Hootsuite Enterprise
- Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
- Social media analytics/reporting
- Dashboard/KPI reporting
- Web content management/CMS experience
- Content editing
- Video/graphic social content
- Accessibility awareness
- ADA/customer accessibility communications
- Title VI awareness
- Public-sector communications standards
- SOP development/use
- Customer response templates/playbooks
- AI-assisted communications or analytics experience
The AI point is especially relevant because PATH requires its contractor to make training available covering social media monitoring, engagement, analytics, long- and short-form writing, and AI.)