Service Blueprints. Complexity made simple.

A service blueprint is a diagram that illustrates the interactions between various service elements within a customer journey. It extends beyond customer journey maps to include complex, multi-channel, and cross-functional services. Each blueprint corresponds to specific customer journeys and associated user goals, allowing for multiple blueprints for different scenarios within the same service.

Definition: A service blueprint visualizes relationships between service components — people, props, and processes — directly linked to touchpoints in a customer journey. It’s particularly useful for complex scenarios involving multiple touchpoints or requiring cross-functional coordination.

Service blueprints are a crucial tool in service design, allowing organizations to visualize and optimize the processes involved in delivering user experiences. Businesses can identify inefficiencies, streamline operations, and improve both employee and customer experiences.

Why a Service Blueprint? They look so complex…

Service blueprints offer a comprehensive understanding of a service and its underlying resources and processes, both visible and invisible to the user. Key benefits include:

You can identify weaknesses

Service blueprints help uncover weaknesses in service delivery. Poor user experiences often stem from internal organizational issues. While interface problems are easy to spot, systemic issues like corrupted data or long wait times are more challenging. Blueprints expose these issues by mapping dependencies, allowing businesses to address root causes.

Optimizing operations sounds good?

By visualizing relationships between service components, blueprints reveal optimization opportunities. Information gathered early in the customer journey can be repurposed later, enhancing customer satisfaction, saving time, and ensuring data consistency. This approach also improves employee efficiency by reducing redundant tasks.

You can coordinate with other departments or colleagues to exit silos

Service blueprints are invaluable for coordinating complex services across departments. Often, departmental success is measured by individual touchpoints, but users experience the service as a whole. Blueprinting captures internal processes throughout the customer journey, providing insights into overlaps and dependencies that individual departments may overlook.

You see it all.

Blueprints offer a holistic view of service delivery, making them strategic tools for planning and decision-making. They help organizations align on goals, identify improvement areas, and prioritize initiatives based on their overall service impact.

Key Elements of a Service Blueprint

Service blueprints can vary in visual form but typically include several key elements:

Customer Actions

Steps, choices, activities, and interactions customers perform to achieve their goals, derived from research or customer journey maps.

Example: In a blueprint for an appliance retailer, customer actions include visiting the website, browsing for appliances, discussing options with a sales assistant, purchasing an appliance, receiving a delivery notification, and getting the appliance delivered.

Frontstage Actions

Visible actions performed by employees or technology interacting directly with the customer, such as human-to-human or human-to-computer interactions.

Example: Frontstage actions for an appliance retailer include store workers greeting customers, a chat assistant on the website providing information, and a delivery scheduler contacting the customer.

Backstage Actions

Activities occurring behind the scenes to support frontstage actions, performed by employees or systems not visible to the customer.

Example: Backstage actions for the appliance retailer include warehouse employees updating inventory, shipping employees checking product quality, and IT staff maintaining the website.

Processes

Internal steps and interactions supporting service delivery, including systems, workflows, and policies.

Example: Processes for the appliance retailer include credit-card verification, pricing updates, delivery logistics, and quality testing.

Lines

Visual separators distinguishing different interaction levels:

• Line of Interaction: Direct interactions between the customer and the organization.
• Line of Visibility: Separates visible (frontstage) activities from invisible (backstage) activities.
• Line of Internal Interaction: Separates contact employees from those not directly supporting customer interactions.

Evidence

Props and places part of the service experience, visible in both frontstage and backstage activities.

Example: Evidence for the appliance retailer includes the appliances themselves, store signage, the website, tutorial videos, and email communications.

Secondary Elements to Include in a Service Blueprint

Service blueprints can be tailored to specific contexts and goals by incorporating additional elements:

Arrows: Indicate relationships and dependencies between different components, showing the flow of information or actions.

Time: Represent the duration of customer actions, useful when time is a critical variable.

Regulations or Policy: Highlight rules or regulations influencing service delivery, identifying constraints and compliance requirements.

Service-Blueprinting Workshops

Service-blueprinting workshops require planning and hands-on facilitation. These workshops help organizations form a shared language and understanding of the experiences they provide. Additionally, the process of creating service blueprints forces holistic thinking and informs project planning. Service blueprints often have the greatest impact when created collaboratively.

Before the Workshop

Establish Core Team and Goals

Gather an interdisciplinary team of 4–6 stakeholders and executives familiar with the experience you want to map. Define the scenario and customer perspective to focus on during the workshop, such as students registering for classes in a university setting.

Collect and Synthesize Research

Gather internal and external data related to the scenario. Use customer journey maps if available and conduct stakeholder interviews to understand frontstage and backstage actions. Involve your core team throughout the research process to keep them engaged and informed.

Create an Agenda:

Develop a realistic workshop agenda to assist with planning and set participant expectations. A typical 3-hour agenda might include:

1. Introductions and icebreakers (20 mins)
2. Research overview and share (30 mins)
3. Blueprinting (60 mins)
4. Break (15 mins)
5. Playback blueprints (15 mins)
6. Prioritize and discuss fail points (30 mins)
7. Identify next steps (10 mins)

Select Tools and Materials:

For in-person workshops, use sticky notes, large poster boards, markers, tape, and sticky dots. For remote workshops, choose a tool familiar to attendees to save onboarding time and focus on content. (Miro, Figjam etc.)

Set Roles and Responsibilities:

1. Delegate responsibilities like note-taking and timekeeping to workshop attendees. Aim for one facilitator per 12 attendees and consider assigning a backup facilitator for virtual workshops.

During the Workshop

Introductions and Icebreakers: Start with an overview of workshop goals, expectations, and a warmup activity like “two truths and a lie” to energize participants and build rapport.

Research Overview: Allow participants time to review the research, take notes, and share interpretations in small groups. Provide printed materials for in-person workshops and a digital repository for virtual workshops.

Blueprint Key Elements: Document customer actions, frontstage, backstage, and support processes using the diverge-and-converge technique. Allow participants to independently generate notes, then converge to discuss and align on insights.

Use this process: Get the Notion Template.

Track Questions and Assign Action Items:

Use a parking lot to document and assign ownership of questions and gaps in the blueprint. Schedule follow-up meetings to ensure accountability.

Choosing What Experience to Visualize in Service Blueprints

Selecting the right experience to visualize in a service blueprint can be a daunting task, especially for practitioners new to this powerful technique. The decision-making process is crucial as it can significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of the service blueprint. This chapter will provide guidance on how to choose the right scope for your service blueprint, focusing on small-to-medium experiences that are problematic, come with existing data, are due for a redesign soon, and that you can control.

3 Levels of Scope

Service-blueprint scopes can be categorized into three levels:

Small Scope:

• Targeted service blueprint focusing on 2 touchpoints or less.

Example: A university student applies for graduation.

Medium Scope:

• Service blueprint with 5 touchpoints or less.

Example: A university student finds and registers for fall classes.

Large Scope:

• End-to-end experience with a product or organization.

Example: The entire student journey from new enrollment to graduation.

Choosing the appropriate level of scope depends on your goals and the time available for creating the blueprint. Generally, a small-to-medium scope is best for gaining specific insights and identifying strengths and weaknesses within a focused experience.

Choosing an Experience to Evaluate

When determining which experience to visualize in a service blueprint let’s use the example of a SaaS startup. Such a company could consider the following factors:

Problematic Experiences

Focus on areas known to be problematic based on user feedback, support tickets, and analytics. Service blueprints can use insights from customer interviews and user diary studies to understand why an experience is problematic and where issues arise.

Example: If users frequently complain about the complexity of the onboarding process, this would be a prime candidate for a service blueprint. Mapping out the entire onboarding journey can help identify specific pain points and areas for improvement.

Experiences You Can Control

Select experiences where your team has significant influence over the touchpoints and channels. This allows you to implement changes directly based on the blueprint’s findings.

Example: If your team primarily handles user account management and onboarding, mapping the process of setting up an account and completing initial configurations would be appropriate. This ensures that the identified issues can be addressed directly by your team.

Planned Redesigns

Look at strategic planning documents, such as product roadmaps, to identify experiences slated for redesign. Blueprinting these experiences in advance allows for targeted improvements.

Example: If your SaaS platform’s dashboard is due for a redesign, creating a service blueprint of the current dashboard experience can guide the redesign process. This approach helps ensure that the new design addresses existing pain points and enhances the user experience.

Minimal Research Requirements

Choose experiences that require less research time, especially when starting with service blueprinting. Selecting familiar experiences with existing data can streamline the process.

Example: If your team has already gathered substantial data on the user onboarding process from previous studies and user feedback, this can minimize the time needed for additional research. Using this existing data, you can quickly create a service blueprint to identify and address any issues.

A Real-World Application: A SaaS Startup

Imagine a small SaaS startup with a lean team comprising a few engineers, support staff, one designer, and a marketing specialist. This startup struggles with its onboarding process, resulting in customer frustration and high churn rates. Using a service blueprint can be a game-changer for such a company, demonstrating that this tool is not just for larger organizations.

Why a Service Blueprint?

For a small SaaS startup, a service blueprint helps visualize the end-to-end onboarding process, uncovering critical pain points and inefficiencies that may not be immediately apparent. Here’s how it can bring substantial benefits:

Identifying Pain Points: By mapping out every step of the onboarding process, from account creation to the first successful use of the software, the startup can identify exactly where users are encountering difficulties. For instance, the blueprint might reveal that customers frequently get stuck during the data import stage due to a confusing interface.

Optimizing Processes: The blueprint highlights dependencies and inefficiencies, such as redundant steps or bottlenecks. By visualizing these processes, the team can streamline operations, such as simplifying the data import interface and providing real-time support during critical steps.

Improving Collaboration: Sharing the service blueprint with the entire team — including engineers, support, design, and marketing — ensures everyone understands the customer journey and their role in it. This fosters better collaboration and alignment on improvement efforts.

Enhancing Customer Experience: Addressing the identified pain points and optimizing the onboarding process can significantly enhance the user experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and reduced churn rates. For example, introducing a live chat feature during onboarding can provide immediate assistance and reduce drop-off rates.

Supporting Strategic Decisions: The insights gained from the service blueprint can inform strategic decisions and prioritize redesign efforts. Setting measurable goals, such as reducing the onboarding time or increasing user satisfaction scores, helps the startup track progress and demonstrate the impact of their improvements.

Sources:

Service Blueprints: Definition

Service Design 101