Chicago Greeter Journey Mapping Workshops

Chicago Greeter offers visitors a chance to tour one of the city’s 77 neighborhoods with a local expert. Here’s how Mightybytes used customer journey mapping workshops to create a roadmap for improving the service.

In 2010, Mightybytes built a custom software solution that matches potential visitors with local tour guides and helps admins manage tour logistics. After seven years of use and several updates, the folks at Choose Chicago, the organization that runs the Chicago Greeter service, knew it needed improvements, but weren’t sure where to start.

Journey Mapping Workshops

Mightybytes facilitated two customer journey mapping workshops with key Chicago Greeter stakeholders. These workshops helped attendees identify problem areas with the service and devise a plan for improvement.

Mightybytes created the original Chicago Greeter software, so we were already very familiar with the service and its stakeholders. This allowed us to minimize upfront research, something we would typically do if the service was unfamiliar to us. Collaborating with our clients at Choose Chicago, we identified three types of stakeholders for these workshops:

Administrators: Choose Chicago team members tasked with managing the system and facilitating connections between neighborhood experts and those wanting to learn about specific neighborhoods.
Greeters: Chicago neighborhood experts who give tours.
Visitors: People requesting tours of city neighborhoods.

Customer journey mapping workshop whiteboard shot — *We captured important channels, touchpoints, and feelings via the whiteboard for each Chicago Greeter stakeholder type.*

The first journey mapping workshop focused specifically on the admin experience and potential ways to improve their experience. Because Chicago Greeter admins interact with the other stakeholders both through the software platform that Mightybytes built and via other channels such as email, social media, phone, and text, we wanted to identify opportunities to improve the quality of touchpoint interactions across all channels, not just within the system we built.

Attendees for the second customer journey mapping workshop included greeters and a former visitor turned greeter, who provided insights from both perspectives.

Identifying Touchpoints, Channels, and Feelings

In each workshop, we mapped stakeholder journeys across communications channels as they interacted with the Greeter service via a series of touchpoints:

Were visitors able to easily register for a tour via the website or did they abandon the registration process?
Did they complain on Twitter because their greeter never showed?
Did admins have to resort to more traditional communications channels because of missing features within the software system?
Were greeters and visitors communicating independently of the Greeter admin system? If so, what were they saying?

Once these touchpoints were identified, we reviewed and took specific notes about how stakeholders felt during each individual interaction. Were they frustrated? Excited? Angry? Neutral?

Chicago Greeter journey mapping workshop whiteboard — *Once all the important stakeholder information was captured on our whiteboard, we translated and analyzed it for a detailed report.*

By identifying how stakeholders felt during individual interactions a picture began to emerge of where improvements were needed to make the Chicago Greeter experience as delightful as possible for everyone. Using these emotions as guideposts, we then brainstormed potential ways to fix things that were broken, add enhancements to the digital product, and provide more rewarding stakeholder interactions to improve the Chicago Greeter service overall.

Journey Mapping Workshop Deliverables

After the two workshops, Mightybytes delivered a final report that consisted of insights, analysis, and recommendations for improving the Chicago Greeter experience over time based on what we learned from the experience.

Customer journey mapping workshop report deliverables. — *Mightybytes delivered a presentation as well as a detailed spreadsheet outlining all insights from each journey mapping workshop.*

In this report we outlined improvements that arose from our workshops and made recommendations for prioritizing and implementing those improvements into the software platform. With this information, the Chicago Greeter team has a clear roadmap for improving the service—both online and offline—over time.

For more information, check out our customer journey and experience mapping services or read our post, What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Template Download].