Unlock masterful service design blueprints

How a service design blueprint can provide the foundation for your business to meet and exceed your customer’s evolving needs

A service design blueprint is a tool that places the customer at the forefront of the experience. It can help you identify what internal and external forces most impact your customers’ experience with the brand.

The blueprint is comprised of two different components — front stage and back stage actions. The front stage actions are directly seen and experienced by your customer, whether that customer is internal or external. The back stage actions detail the interactions that indirectly influence your customer’s experiences with your brand.

To illustrate front and back stage actions, you can think of watching a performance in a theatre. The audience is the customer who experiences everything that happens on the stage. The back stage actions are all the experiences indirectly impacting the performance. For example, the ushers quickly help the attendees find their seats. The lighting, stage props, costume, make up, orchestra, and many others may not be directly noticed by the audience, yet they play an invaluable role in crafting the best experience for your customers.

Companies most often leverage service design blueprints in order to identify friction points between the customer and internal people, process, and technology — the point where front and back stage actions meet.

Let’s break down people, process, and technology into a tangible example.

During the recent pandemic, several flights I had booked were cancelled. I called the airlines and had a variety of positive and frustrating experiences related to inefficient people, process, and technologies.

For instance, one airline hung up on me and denied me the ability to speak with a person. (I called about 5 times in an attempt to talk to a real person. I pressed 0 and Google searched for other ways to talk to a person to no avail.) A blueprint would be able to determine what back stage actions need to be resolved to provide a better front stage interaction. Is it based on lack of resources? Outdated technology? Process impediments? A combination of people and technology? Or something else we may discover through research? (We will get to research soon!)

Conversely, the blueprint also uses qualitative data to highlight exemplary customer interactions. For example, for another cancelled flight, I was able to have the airline call me back. This gave me the sense that they were on my side and wanted to provide me with the best service, leading to my brand loyalty.

The micro-interactions I experienced with the airline due to my cancelled flights affected my perception of the brand, and ultimately increased my brand loyalty to the airline who offered the most seamless experience. Broadly speaking, brands that place their customer-first who prioritize and focus on business initiatives related to micro brand interaction tend to have higher customer retention, increased loyalty, and customers who advocate for their brand. These actions lead to increased sales, new customers, and wider followings on social media. In stark contrast, when brands stop placing customers at the core of the experience, they tend to lose formerly loyal customers and experience the sunk cost of losing customers they worked so hard to win due to poor service.

Service design blueprints enable us to see the trickling effects of the micro interactions, and guide businesses to prioritize decisions related to their customer’s needs. Blueprints allow us to uncover why a business is unable to service its patrons effectively and find patterns across various consumer to brand touch-points.

Why should my company use a service design blueprint when there are already so many other tools out there?

Business tools, such as value-stream mapping and process mapping, enable teams to identify how to improve a process, technology, or internal customer experience. In comparison, customer experience tools, such as journey mapping, identify critical moments in a customer’s brand interaction that either result in increased brand loyalty or a desire to use a competitor. Service design blueprints combine the outputs of these tools — business objectives and KPIs, process flows, and customer experience in one succinct view.

Thanks to these additional tools, a service design blueprint may be closer than you think. Here’s how you can save time and money by leveraging existing resources to create a service design blueprint for your company:

Value stream mapping

“Value stream mapping is a flowchart method to illustrate, analyze and improve the steps required to deliver a product or service.” (Lucidchart). One of its primary uses is to quantify inefficiencies within your organization that are most impacting the bottom line. This tool is great to use as you craft your service design blueprint when you want to optimize internal process to increase revenue. The value stream map can be a key tool in helping your organization complete the back-stage actions of the blueprint. As a bonus, this tool will help your business formulate KPIs to measure the success of your prioritized initiative design blueprint. In one central view, you will have quantitative data, qualitative data, KPIs, and the foundation for how you will improve your business. (Score!)

Process mapping

According to Gartner, process mapping “combines process/workflow, organizational and data/resource views with underlying metrics to provide a foundation for analyzing value chains, activity-based costs, bottlenecks, critical paths and inefficiencies.”

Process maps are effective tools because they show end-to-end processes, can be built rapidly using minimal resources, and can facilitate alignment on a given process within a team. If your business has this tool, your service design blueprint has a great foundation for the backstage actions, especially in regards to the people, process, and technology portion.

When leveraging this tool as an input to your service design blueprint, I recommend thinking about the customer as your business moves through the outlined process. For example, at a restaurant, a customer has to order the pasta to initiate this flow. Who from your organization is there to support their experience as they wait? What are the business ramifications and processes in place if the pasta is underdone or doesn’t meet the customer’s needs? These questions are answered in journey maps — the front stage portion of your blueprint.

Journey mapping

Journey maps detail a customer’s emotional state as they interact with a brand (call customer support to get a refund) or complete a digital task (e-commerce browsing-purchase experience) over a certain period of time.

Traditionally, journey maps rely on qualitative data and are used by product teams to improve the customer experience, so extending them to service design blueprints feels seamless. Both tools are moving toward the same goal — better customer experiences.

Service design blueprint

Slalom Created Service Design Blueprint

Value-stream mapping, process mapping, and journey mapping are tools that focus on specific areas on the process or experience to identify improvements. Value-stream mapping and process mapping take a business-first lens and are great tools when creating the backstage actions of the service design blueprint. They tell you what is happening on the business operational side and can help your business pinpoint inefficiencies in the backstage processes. On the flip side of the coin, the journey map takes a customer-first lens and will tell you the impact on your customer your operational inefficiencies are having. Recall the earlier example of the airline who forced me to wait on the call for two hours before being serviced. The backstage inefficiencies could be an antiquated phone operating system and lack of interconnected technology, resulting customer service representatives dealing with angry customers who have waited for two hours. This can negatively impact your attrition rates and cause loyal customers to leave.

Separately these tools showcase incredible insights to the backstage or front stage business inefficiencies, yet the connective tissue between the two stages is imperative to achieve maximum success. Akin to the theatre, if you poured money to solve a lighting issue but you never solved the sound issue, the performance wouldn’t be as successful as it could be.

When you combine the front stage and back stage into one succinct view, you have the power to make more informed and prioritized business decisions to help your employees, your customers, and ultimately, your bottom line. The service design blueprint allows you to see the lighting AND the sound issues on one view so that you can prioritize each of them based on level of effort, business value, and impact to customer.

Why does it matter to have both business and customer viewpoints in one document?

In a connected world full of choice, brands and products are commodity services. Consumers will gravitate and purchase products from companies who are agile, continue to innovate, and make business decisions based around their customer’s voice.

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”

- Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO

It is instrumental for your business to meet and exceed your customer’s evolving needs. A brand’s failure to hear the needs of the consumers has resulted in a fast-track to demise. For example, I remember my father always complaining about how expensive cabs were. You would sit in the backseat and watch the bill go up and up and up. Then, Uber came to town and disrupted the cab industry. No one paying based on the number of customers, and there was an option for a black car with amenities, which made me feel like a celebrity. Cab companies failed to innovate and meet their customer’s needs. Likewise, when Lyft began it seemed strange that they were going to take on the Goliath of Uber. Nevertheless, Lyft offered a unique valuable proposition that came at a lesser price than Uber. Lyft was able to establish its position as another David able to take on Goliath.

In another example, we see movie theatres changing their business model to offer alcohol to patrons over 21, Facebook replicating its competitor’s feature to stay relevant — such as copying Snapchat’s story feature, and Southwest offering free baggage to all customers.

When innovation is paramount to your company’s ability to survive, it is ever-increasingly important to include your customer in your business decision. During the pandemic, this message resounds more than ever. There has been a pivotal shift in how the customer consumes and engages during COVID-19. Their needs change daily, and they seek brands who can keep up — from providing Zoom games to giving them Zoom breaks because Zoom fatigue is real. However, we must be careful when listening to our customers because what they say they want may not be what they actually need.

How should I use a service design blueprint?

A service design blueprint gives your company all the pieces to prioritize and inform business decisions. Once your blueprint is complete, it’s up to you and your team to implement and realize these business initiatives.

Let’s look at an example at why service design blueprints can be critical components to rapid agility, customer retention, and your business’s bottom line.

In 1999, the Swiffer was unveiled. Continuum was hired by Proctor & Gamble to create a new mopping experience. Gianfranco Zaccai, President and Chief Design Officer at Continuum, spearheaded research to understand what people were doing, how much time it took, and why they were doing it. They used surveys and observational research methods. In the surveys, people said they wanted large quantities of cleaning supplies. In observational, the research team discovered that people spent as much time cleaning their mop as they did their floors AND that people were only using small quantities of a cleaning supply in practice.

“Development really depends on empathy for what’s going on,” Gianfranco Zaccai said. “It’s definitely work understanding what people say, what they do, and what they care about.”

Enter the big idea.

The Swiffer used qualitative and quantitive data points to solve the customer’s large pain point — cleaning the mop as much as they did their floors — while enabling the business team to meet and succeed their KPIs. The key to success was combining both data pieces to formulate one clear business initiative.

Who should be involved in the creation of a service design blueprint?

The nature of how a blueprint is created is foundational to success. They combine multiple disciplines, stakeholders’ perspectives, business needs, and consumer experiences into one view. Inherently, gathering these perspectives and acquiring a unified vision on one sheet of paper requires multi-disciplinary collaboration and communication across your organization. This is why this tool is so effective — it de-silos organizations and provides forums for cross-functional teams to communicate and align on one direction, whereas formerly these teams each had their own directions, KPIs, and may have been duplicating efforts or re-inventing the wheel.

As a consultant, I understand it can be very hard to eliminate silos in large-matrix organizations. That’s why I tell my clients we need a leadership champion who has some clout in the organization to get behind the service design blueprint. The leadership champion can rally fractured teams to get behind the blueprint and can evangelize with other leaders why you are doing this. They are the ones who will carry the blueprint forward and show to their executives why it is instrumental in the process.

Sometimes, you may need to work a bit harder to find a leadership champion. When this happens, I like to show, not tell. Show leaders and teams what the end deliverable will look like and explain using anecdotal evidence how it will benefit them. I like to start this process by listening first to the team’s pain points. They may sound like this:

• “Our team’s important projects get de-prioritized often, making it hard for us to make an impact within our organization.” (process, people)
• “We spend a significant amount of money to create tools that our teams don’t adopt.” (technology, process, people)
• “Skilled workers spend more time doing task-based work than problem-solving work.” (technology, process, people)
• “Janna solved all of our problems; then she left and we don’t how what to do.” (process, people)
• “Our call centers receive X amount of volume related to problems customers could solve on their own” (technology, process, people)

Then, you craft your service design blueprint to include and recommend a solution for each of these pain points that is based on business metrics, customer metrics, quantitative and qualitative data points, and former business / customer-centric deliverables. I’ve found using this method has enabled me to find a leadership champion to advocate and leverage this deliverable to make and prioritize business decisions.

When this happens, the document becomes a living, breathing evolution that more and more stakeholders want to use and include their project team’s KPIs and metics. Project teams start to interact with each other more, and problems are now being holistically tackled rather than market by market. Ultimately, your organization shifts and rallies towards unified, common goals that benefit the entire company rather than fractured goals that help only a specific project team within a market.

In the past, the customer experience was not often at the core of innovation, which enables teams to solve problems in siloes. Now, in a connected world full of choice, brands and products are commodity services. Customers are impatient because now at their fingertips, they can browse and compare competitor’s sites, read reviews, get a package delivered in two hours, and are inundated with your competitor’s products. Consumers naturally gravitate towards innovation, agility, and brands who solve their problems from paying too much for cabs to cleaning floors to selling alcohol during a movie. Customers want to be heard and to feel their time is valuable through more than lip service.

The next time you’re wondering how to pivot your business to meet and exceed your customer’s evolving needs, start with a service design blueprint. I have seen it work time and time again, and come with positive side-effects such as de-siloing your organization and creating one clear vision for your company’s future.

Sophie Cummings is a senior UX designer who empowers teams to find customer-first solutions and works to de-silos product organizations. She thrives in making analytical insights actionable to all teams through a customer-first lens. Reach her at sophie.cummings@slalom.com.

Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.