By MARTY LEVINE
A real voice — that’s what callers to Pitt want to hear most, says Maureen Ryczaj, the University’s lone full-time operator. Ryczaj and her team of two part-time staffers and several student employees answer up to 250 calls a week from all over the world — but mostly from Pitt students and their parents.
Ryczaj has spent several stints at the University, in other departments, but became Pitt’s operator — part of Pitt IT’s telecommunications staff — in 2016.
“We still call it ‘the board,’” she says, referring to the position’s older name — the switchboard — which conjures black and white images of young women pulling wires from one spot and plugging them into another. Ryczaj has only seen that old equipment when it was used in a piece of art on display once in the Cathedral of Learning.
“ ‘I just want to speak to a person’ — that is our number one request,” she says. “Keep in mind, we are the tangible first line to the University. We try to treat every caller as a guest. The first voice that a caller hears is our team. The first impression we give is important. We treat them with dignity and we keep in mind that that is a very hard-earned reputation” held by Pitt. “We have to make sure that we are trusted — and that they like that they can connect with a person.”
Finding the right person with whom to connect a caller is “easy,” she says. Callers just “hate voicemail, and they hate e-mail. Expectations are big” — in particular for students’ parents. “They’re paying to send their child here. They just want to speak to someone. And they are grateful we get them connected. Connection changes everything. Callers will call back and thank us.
“We don’t hear the end results sometimes, because all we do is connect,” she adds of her job. But an operator knows the call is successful from the beginning, she says, when “there is a sigh of relief” that the caller has reached a person.
Yes, sometimes people call prepared to yell about a problem, real or perceived. They may be upset that Pitt has a controversial speaker, or that a certain type of research is being done here. And there are questions from way off the beaten track that Ryczaj says she “can’t explain or comprehend. We just have to listen — emphasizing that we are here for you. It sort of settles the caller down.” Sometimes, though, she says she has to take her own break to recover.
“People tell us everything — sometimes it’s a mental health (situation). We get them connected to the people who can help. It takes a team. The team is seriously strong. We know when we have a bad moment we are there to support each other.”
And there are the moments to celebrate — when callers tell her they had been vacillating between Pitt and another college, but will now choose Pitt, simply because they were able to reach a human.
One of the biggest challenges she recalls came in April 2023, when parents were seeking answers about active shooter calls at Hillman Library, which turned out to be a hoax.
“I can’t even put into words the panic of the parents who were calling,” Ryczaj says.
The second biggest challenge came when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, after the U.S. pulled out, and a Pitt professor and her team were providing emergency asylum assistance to many, many Afghan scholars and other citizens. Ryczaj recalls one Afghani man who was asking, “Please help me and my family. He called 85 times, and apologized. He called back at the end and said we helped him.”
When scammers con people into, say, buying Pitt football tickets or giving their personal information to something supposedly connected with the University, they end up calling the Pitt operator — eventually. “We go through a procedure to make sure the callers feel safe,” Ryczaj says, directing them to the police or an ID theft prevention company.
Through the years, Ryczaj has earned certificates from Pitt’s Student Affairs department as a “mental health champion” and “career champion,” just to be able to better direct calls more precisely to staff members in this department, which is among Pitt locations called most often. She and her team keep stats on what places callers are trying to reach and trends in caller questions, consulting with the appropriate Pitt department to figure out where best to direct calls.
And every fall she hires and trains a new crop of student operators.
As a little sign she has placed on the front of her desk reminds her every day: “Everybody’s sense of urgency is completely different than everybody else’s. Courtesy and respect are key.”
“I tell my team, please just be reliable, please be consistent. Let them just have a trustworthy experience on the phone.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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