Service blueprint know hows
What Is a Service Blueprint?
A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.
Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or require the coordination of multiple departments.
A service blueprint corresponds to a specific customer journey and the specific user goals associated to that journey. This journey can vary in scope. Thus, for the same service, you may have multiple blueprints if there are several different scenarios that it can accommodate. For example, with a restaurant business, you may have separate service blueprints for the tasks of ordering food for takeout versus dining in the restaurant.
Service blueprints should always align to a business goal: reducing redundancies, improving the employee experience, or converging siloed processes.
Benefits of Service Blueprinting
Service blueprints give an organisation a comprehensive understanding of its service and the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — that make it possible.
01 Discover weaknesses
Poor user experiences are often due to an internal organisational shortcoming — a weak link in the ecosystem. While we can quickly understand what may be wrong in a user interface (bad design or a broken button), determining the root cause of a systemic issue (such as corrupted data or long wait times) is much more difficult. Blueprinting exposes the big picture and offers a map of dependencies, thus allowing a business to discover a weak leak at its roots.
02 Identify opportunities for optimisation
The visualisation of relationships in blueprints uncovers potential improvements and ways to eliminate redundancy.
03 Bridge crossdepartment efforts
Often, a department’s success is measured by the touchpoint it owns. However, users encounter many touchpoints throughout one journey and don’t know (or care) which department owns which touchpoint. While a department could meet its goal, the big-picture, organization-level objectives may not be reached. Blueprinting forces businesses to capture what occurs internally throughout the totality of the customer journey — giving them insight to overlaps and dependencies that departments alone could not see.
Key Elements of a Service Blueprint
Service blueprints take different visual forms, some more graphic than others. Regardless of visual form and scope, every service blueprint comprises some key elements:
Customer actions
Steps, choices, activities, and interactions that customer performs while interacting with a service to reach a particular goal. Customer actions are derived from research or a customer-journey map.
e.g. visiting the website, visiting the store and browsing for appliances, discussing options and features with a sales assistant, appliance purchase, getting a delivery-date notification, and finally receiving the appliance.
Frontstage actions
Actions that occur directly in view of the customer. These actions can be human-to-human or human-to-computer actions.
e.g. a mobile app, an ATM, the store worker meets and greets customers or a chat assistant on the website informs them which units have which features.
Backstage actions
Steps and activities that occur behind the scenes to support onstage happenings.
e.g. A warehouse employee inputs and updates inventory numbers into the point-of-sale software; a shipping employee checks the unit’s condition and quality; a chat assistant contacts the factory to confirm lead times; employees maintain and update the company’s website with the newest units; the marketing team creates advertising material.
Processes
Internal steps, and interactions that support the employees in delivering the service. This element includes anything that must occur for all of the above to take place.
e.g. credit-card verification, pricing, delivery of units to the store from the factory, writing quality tests, and so on.
In a service blueprint, key elements are organized into clusters with lines that separate them. There are three primary lines:
- The line of interaction depicts the direct interactions between the customer and the organization.
- The line of visibility separates all service activities that are visible to the customer from those that are not visible. Everything frontstage (visible) appears above this line, while everything backstage (not visible) appears below this line.
- The line of internal interaction separates contact employees from those who do not directly support interactions with customers/users.
The last layer of a service blueprint is evidence, which is made of the props and places that anyone in the blueprint has an exchange with. Evidence can be involved in both frontstage and backstage processes and actions.
In our appliance example, evidence includes the appliances themselves, signage, physical stores, website, tutorial video, or email inboxes.
