sijie jiang group project's experience

TSTD 4900 is a short but intense summer class focusing greatly on managing customer experience.  It is my first time to finish a group fieldwork project including a presentation within three days however, I have accomplished this task with Dan and Brett on time. Speaking of our Smithsonian Museum and National Park Memorial group project, we chose American History Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, Vietnam Veteran Memorial and FDR Memorial as the group project Mystery Shop targets. We used a number of qualitative methodologies including the critical incident technique, social listening, and participant observation to explore and examine the customer experience during the above four sightseeing visiting. The whole project consists executive summary with the most important findings and recommendation, marketing/PR Audit with an analysis of paid, owned and earned media channels, participant observation and mapping, social media monitoring, interview, and participant observation. Mystery Shopping Form is the fundamental of the overall project, so we spent the first day of meeting at Smithsonian Castle to discuss how to create the forms of both museum and memorial and then we revised and regrouped the forms in the following two days. We finished 6 Mystery Shopping Form Excel sheets and more than 300 cells calculation to to combine performance scores of the American History Museum as well as the Vietnam Memorial and the scores were applied on our Importance-Performance Analysis graph later. Our group's recommendation to the Smithsonian and National Park Service is for them to offer multi-language audio service, which helps international tourist to enjoy and engage in their Smithsonian visitings better. In addition, they should also focus on improving the app/mobile site mapping performance. However, based on Donald Leadbetter's comments who serves as partnership coordinator in the National Park Service U.S Department of the Interior and he pointed out that we also have to consider the cost that is needed to perfect the mapping service on mobile site and app.