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Shelley Price (MCRP '16) discusses her research and time at Georgia Tech
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What was your paper about?
I used the National Park Service (NPS) as a model for why and how a public organization could make its decision-making more efficient by making it more customer-oriented. Specifically, I investigated how customer experience measurement might be implemented to plan for more meaningful access to nature for national park visitors with disabilities. Customer experience is the perception that customers have of all of their interactions with an organization. The idea of customer experience is one that is often used within the private sector to design and sell products and services but is underutilized among public organizations.
“Meaningful” access is key. Just because the picnic area and restroom meet federal requirements for accessibility does not mean that a visitor with a disability is able to fully experience the true reason one might go to a national park!
I conducted expert interviews with NPS employees at all levels as well as customer experience professionals from a variety of industries. These enabled me to identify specific improvement opportunities for the ways in which the NPS thinks about, measures, designs, and strategizes the visitor experience. I then proposed a process for collecting data on the visitor experience and design practices to utilize those customer-based insights.
My proposal will help park managers prioritize the specific access improvements that would have the greatest impact on park experiences of the target visitor segment. These included:
- Establishing a visitor experience team within the National Park Service to champion visitor-driven decisions.
- Utilizing exercises that help staff understand the barriers visitors with disabilities face to having meaningful experiences.
- One exercise might include a simple, but frequently missed, exercise of mapping out the details of a visitor journey. This journey map will illuminate points in the experience at which barriers could be removed, from the minute potential visitors start to plan their trips to the details of parking their cars and getting to trailheads.
- Another essential exercise to incorporate into the planning and management process is an immersion exercise to increase employees’ empathy for the needs of visitors with disabilities. A simple example of this technique might include requiring all staff to spend a few hours getting around their park in a wheelchair to help them understand barriers wheelchair users face.
- Collecting information on visitors’ experiences via a smartphone app that tags the location in which a person reports a positive experience or an area in need of improvements.
Status
- Workflow Status: Published
- Created By: Jessie Brandon
- Created: 09/28/2016
- Modified By: Jessie Brandon
- Modified: 11/01/2016
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