UX Diary #1— Service Blueprint
Service Design is a human-centered strategic design discipline that optimizes how customers and business interact so that each can achieve their desired outcomes. The tools and methods of service design orchestrate how people, processes and technology come together to deliver unparalleled customer experiences.
“What I’ve seen in the last three/four years is that there is more and more need for business understanding — that doesn’t actualy mean that as a designer you need to have a full knowledge of business, but at least you have to understand the value that is there.” — Oli Shaw | Group Design Director at Fjord
— source: servicedesigntoday.org
The service blueprint is an applied process chart which shows the service delivery process from the customers perspective.
Elements
This part of text looks little boring and confusing but we will understand clearly with examples at the end of part.
Physical Evidence: Communication channels along the service processes. (Websites, Blogs, Social Media)
Customer Actions: The steps that the customers take as the part of delivery process.
Front Stage (Visible Contact) Actions: Steps taken by contact employees as part of the face-to-face service encounter.
Back Stage (Invisible Contact) Actions: Non-visible steps taken by contact, employees behind the line of visibility.
The line of visibility is the thing which separates the front stage and back stage of actions.
Support Processes: Customer is not communicate with employees but employees communicates with customers as services.
Line of Interaction: (Optional) Line of interaction separates customers actions from service provider actions.
Line of Internal Interaction: (Optional) Line of internal interaction separates the back office and the support process.
Line of Implemantation: (Optional) Line of implementation separates managament zone from the support zone. Management is responsible for pllaning and controlling while support activities include preparation.
Line of Order: (Optional) Penetration which separates customer-included activities from customer-independent activities.
Applications
Simple Presentations: A basic application for blueprint is as a simple form of representing or codifying what is actually occuring in the current operation.
Diagnosing Operational Deficiensies: Blueprints have also found widespread applications as diagnostic tools designed to uncover operational weaknesses.
Service Design: “Planning for Structural Change/New Service Development” Using a simple diagrammatic representation of the process, designer could pose “What if?” type scenarios and reconfigure the service process in the blueprint form, without cousing major distruptions in real time.
Building a Blueprint
The original service blueprint is a highly visual, graphical map that delineates the key contact points in the service process and the nature of the contact. It can be seen as a two dimensional map in which the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents the basic steps in the process. A line of visibility is included to separate actions visible to the customer from actions out of sight.
The process of structuring a blueprint involves between five and seven steps, depending on the intended application. From the outset, the blueprint was designed to be seen from the customer’s perspective while simultaneously providing insights for management. Accordingly, the starting point should be to imagine the customer’s step-by-step contact points, indicating, where known, customer’s expectations in terms of minimum tolerable waiting times for each step.
Basic Service Blueprint
1- Identify activities, sequence of activities and linkages between activities. Activities include; customer actions, front stage contact personnel actions, back stage contact personnel actions, support activities.
2- Identify line of visibility and add to blueprint.
3- Identify standards and tolerances, scripts, operating procedures, supporting services and inventory for each step and add to blueprint.
4- If required, draw additional lines such as line of physical interaction and line of IT interaction.
5- Specify timeframs-show average timing or minimum tolerable customer expectations for each step and indicate responsible personnel.
6- Identify and note fail points and excessive waits.
7- Manipulate divergence and complexity.
I created a basic service blueprint for one of my clients — which I am consulting digital marketing — that is a women shoes e-commerce brand FYSLShoes.com. I created this service blueprint via miro.com.
The next part of UX Diary is about Customer Journey Mapping. Click here to read the post!
