Service Blueprinting
A guide to service mapping for improving CX with Visualisation
Service design is defined as the pursuit of planning and organizing a business’ resources: people, tools, methods to improve not just the customer experience, yet significantly more the employees’ experience. Service blueprinting is the fundamental tool we use in this service design process.
So, what is a service blueprint?
Service blueprints help you visually demonstrate how service functions. It is like architecture blueprints when you’re fabricating a house you have to have an outline to guide the build when you’re building a product or service you need to have a service plan to help characterize the structure of your service.
It’s a visualization of the complex relationships across services in a business and how everything operates together it includes the relevant individuals and touchpoints of the customer journey and any evidence or relics. The service blueprint is the subsequent stage after the customer journey map it is particularly indispensable to create the service blueprint with a complex business where there is a wide range of systems individuals and things that operate together the customer journey is one piece of the riddle and the service blueprint aims to fabricate the complete image.
When should we use service blueprints?
Practitioners can use service blueprints when defining their research plan to identify gaps in their current knowledge. This usage of blueprinting reduces the likelihood of spending significant time and resources, gathering research that’s already known. Additionally, these blueprints educate stakeholders of their resources and the bandwidth needed to conduct the necessary research.
Now, once a service blueprint, albeit a low-fidelity one, is created, it can be used to evaluate the holistic service and identify gaps, redundancies, or friction points. These gaps can then be prioritized for redesign based on the opportunity they present to the organization.
Service blueprints are also used later in the product design life cycle to help inform project planning, tracking success, and informing strategic decisions. For practitioners in these cases, the artefact acted as a shared visualization used to communicate future work, align priorities, and inform ideal future-state service models.
Why should we use service blueprints?
1. Bridges cross-department efforts
In terms of benefits, the most frequently mentioned benefit of using a service blueprint was a shared language and understanding. Service blueprints help departments align behind a common goal, empower team members, and educate stakeholders about the experience as it exists today.
2. Identify opportunities for optimization
Service blueprints make invisible service components visible and help put products in context. Refocusing on the bigger picture, instead of products or departments as silos, can lead to consistency across channels and a positive experience for both end-users and employees.
3. Discover weaknesses
So whether your goal is to discover service weaknesses, reduce redundancies, converge silos or anything in-between, service blueprints help visualize all of the intangible aspects of the experiences we provide.
The four key components of service blueprints
There are four essential pieces of a service blueprint that all service blueprints must-have.
1. Customer actions
The first being customer actions; this is what drives your blueprint. If you already have a customer journey map, use that content. This is what your user is doing throughout your service.
2. Frontstage or visible employee actions
Next are frontstage actions. This is how your company interacts with your user. They can be human-to-human, like someone helping a customer in a store, or human-to-computer, someone helping a customer through maybe a chatbot on their website.
3. Backstage or invisible contact employee actions
Next, we have backstage actions. This is what’s occurring backstage behind the curtain of your organization to support those frontstage happenings.
4. Support processes
And then, last, the foundation of your blueprints are the support processes: anything that must occur for all of the above to take place.
After those four, you can add in other things: arrows that start to show dependencies, evidence: like pamphlets or email transcripts; metrics: what is a success for your company? Time: how fast is everything happening? As you begin to blueprint, my best advice is to just start small. Scope and work within your realm of responsibility.
The five steps to service blueprinting
So this is all great, but where do you start? I’m going to run through a five-step process that you can use when you begin a service blueprinting initiative.
Step 1: Find
The first step is finding support. Pull together a cross-disciplinary team that has responsibility for the different portions of your user’s experience. Establish stakeholder support for the initiative, which could come from a manager, or executives, or clients.
Step 2: Define
Next, you’re going to define the goal. What are you trying to achieve by this blueprint? Awareness? Consensus? A connection from related departments? You want to define the scope and goal of the initiative, both as a team and with stakeholders.
Step 3: Gather
From here, you’re going to start to gather that research. The research is going to come from customers, employees, and stakeholders. Remember you have two parts to gather: both the customer research alongside that internal research. Choose a minimum of two research methods that put you in a direct line of observation with employees. Remember to use a multi-pronged approach here. Select and combine multiple methods to reveal insights from different angles and job roles. These could be employee interviews, direct observation, contextual inquiry, even diary studies. These three steps are going to set you up for success in that fourth.
Step 4: Map
You’re going to use the research you gathered to fill in a low-fidelity blueprint. I like to work in a top-down approach, and then go back in and layer those additional attributes.
Step 5: Refine
After mapping, you’ll move into a refining and distribution phase. Add in those additional layers that you didn’t originally include in your blueprint. These could be metrics, emotion, opportunities. Refine towards a high fidelity blueprint that can serve as a single source of truth for all your different departments.
Main Takeaway
When businesses successfully translate the complexity of their business and the services they extend into a visual artefact such as a Service Blueprint, they enhance the possibility of elevating the customer experience by addressing fields of development that are stipulated on the blueprint, as well as ways to gauge their prosperity.
Service designers use various visualization techniques broadly in the phase of deciphering user research, and in this manner, visualizations become early models of understanding both the intricacy space and the resolution space. The visualization methods of the service designers convey with them qualities of service rationale or product-service frameworks, as in they feature enactive, transient, on-going just as social parts of the design object. For these reasons, I strongly feel that along with the characters of services, visualizations appear to be a fundamental tool for a service designer.
