Service Blueprinting in EdTech (Clever’s Journey)
Co-written by Sneha Rao and Nick Friebel, teachers turned designers who work at Clever, an EdTech company focused on unlocking digital learning for all students.
As product designers, we sometimes frame our customer experiences only within the products we create. However, understanding the customer journey beyond the product provides a much clearer picture of your organizations’ overall service, which can reveal critical insights and inform how you design the customer experience. To capture that complete customer journey, service blueprinting can help you map out the orchestration of people, touch points, processes, and technology both frontstage (what customers see) and backstage (what happens behind the scenes).
Why make a service blueprint?
The biggest benefits of a service blueprint are that you can use it to:
- Gain alignment and a shared understanding of an end-to-end service experience. Service blueprints are particularly valuable when multiple teams need to come together to deliver on a vision for a service. This is also why when building your service blueprint, you should have representation from these different groups to help capture the whole picture.
- Visualize all the interactions, dependencies, and breakdowns of a service concept. A service blueprint will help you visually communicate all aspects of what can be an abstract concept, and makes it more tangible. This will ultimately make it easier to picture where and how existing and future ideas fit into a service and allow you to make more meaningful conversations with stakeholders or anyone outside of your immediate team.
Creating a service blueprint for the Clever App Store
At Clever we used service blueprints to map out the existing service and ideal, future service of how school administrators purchased educational technology through the Clever App Store. For a school administrator searching for a software solution, it was difficult to :
- browse or compare the different options on the market
- see feedback from other educators who’ve used the product in the field
- seamlessly roll out edtech solutions to the classroom
As a result, the end to end purchasing process is time consuming, easy to mess up, and classrooms feel the impact. The long term goal of Clever’s App Store team was for Clever to address this problem and become the go-to place for school administrators to discover, evaluate, and purchase educational resources.
At the time, we were a new team who was brought together to define and execute on a visionary experience for school purchasing through Clever’s App Store but we all had different levels of knowledge regarding this problem space and what the existing service looked like. The blueprint of the existing service of school purchasing allowed us to identify all of our assumptions and knowledge gaps. This ultimately informed a research plan that we used to go learn about all the key players in school purchasing such as edtech coaches, assistant principals, schools principals, and financial assistants. We were then able to update the blueprint of the existing service model with validated pain points, which gave us a really clear birds-eye view of how school administrators purchased educational technology.
We had a lot of great ideas about the service that we wanted to provide but it wasn’t until we mapped out a service blueprint for our vision that we started to explore business and operational viability.
We were able to quickly see the operational issues that needed to be addressed in order to deliver the service. Questions started to surface around how were we going to process payments, how were we going to loop in the finance team, and how were we going to notify the application being sold.
This is when we also discovered that we could have multiple service blueprints at different zoom levels.
For example, school administrators had a few different payment method options from paying with credit card, PO, and check. Each type of payment method had its own sub-service. We were able to zoom out to cover a large amount of the experience regarding payment methods at a low level of detail AND zoom in to cover a smaller part of each payment method experience in more detail. Because of the scale of our service we needed multiple blueprints at different levels of zoom.
The service blueprint charting the way forward
When we looked across the two blueprints we could also identify user actions that were missing and the in-product components needed to bring the new service to life.
This helped us identify what new features needed to be built and what entirely new projects needed to be kicked off in order to get the school purchasing service running.
We were ultimately able to use this as a starting point for our product roadmap.
The service blueprint of our vision also helped communicate all the interactions and dependencies of this service concept to other teams at Clever. At the time, another team at Clever was also working on the way district administrators purchase IT tools, and using a service blueprint to anchor our conversations made it easier to picture where and how existing and future ideas could fit within our service vision.
As a result, we were able to have more meaningful conversations with stakeholders and others outside of our immediate team.
Evaluating our service in an international context
In addition to mapping school purchasing in the Clever App Store, we’ve also used service blueprints at Clever to develop a deeper understanding of how our overall service model performs in contexts outside the US. Although up until now Clever’s products and services have focused exclusively on customer needs in the US, we recently developed an interest in which international needs we were best positioned to serve.
To feed this curiosity, we set out to discover if our current service model would meet the needs of international markets that looked relatively similar to the US. Given the cultural similarities and shared use of English as the primary language spoken in schools, we chose the UK and Australia as the first countries to investigate. However, in order to effectively evaluate how our service model performed in these international contexts, we needed a complete understanding of the service we intended to measure. That’s where service blueprinting came in.
Since we wanted to test if schools in the UK and Australia could easily onboard to Clever and use at least one product they were interested in, we set our focus on evaluating the various product and service channels that facilitated a new customer joining Clever.
Our first step was to map out the three channels that comprise our service when a new customer wants to join Clever:
- customer actions (what the customer does)
- Clever frontstage actions (what the customer sees)
- Clever backstage actions (what the customer doesn’t see, but supports the overall service).
To accurately map these three channels, we interviewed internal stakeholders from teams across the company who support any frontstage or backstage actions, including customer success, district onboarding, customer education, data analytics, product, engineering, and design. With the input of these cross-functional stakeholders, we developed the first draft of our service blueprint and, in so doing, developed a clearer understanding of the service we intended to evaluate in an international context.
With our service mapped out, we then met with school customers in the UK and Australia who expressed interest in using Clever to see how well our service supported getting them access to the products they wanted to use. To get a clear picture of how well our onboarding service was performing, we recorded customer feedback during pre and post onboarding interviews, reviewed email exchanges with our support teams, and tracked product analytics through the in-product onboarding funnel.
After reviewing the onboarding experience for seven Australian and four British school customers we saw a clear trend emerge: the majority of these customers were from single schools, which did not align well with Clever’s onboarding service that had been optimized for mid-sized to large US school districts with mature technical infrastructure and IT teams.
To support this theme, we added two new rows to our service blueprint that tracked specific customer pain points and the corresponding opportunities Clever had to address them.
Once the service blueprint reflected what we had learned from our international customers, we met again as a cross-functional team to review the findings, share thoughts, and determine our next steps.
Ultimately, this service blueprint discussion led to three initiatives that continue to shape Clever’s approach to international customer onboarding:
- Create an MVP of a new, simplified service that targets the needs of single schools
- Re-evaluate how we ingest data for smaller school organizations
- Begin to shift our language away from technical, US-centric terminology that makes navigating our onboarding service difficult for international customers
How to create your own service blueprint
To get the whole picture of a customer’s journey, here are the steps to create a service blueprint:
- Write a scenario that captures what a specific customer would want to achieve using your service. In our examples, this was a school administrator in the US trying to purchase new curriculum tools for their schools and an administrator at an Australian or British single school trying to get started on Clever.
- Map out the customer actions, frontstage actions, and backstage actions needed to ensure the customer achieves their goal. In our examples, we interviewed internal stakeholders from every team that touched any of these three channels.
- Evaluate how well your current service enables customers to achieve their goals. In our examples we looked at app store and international customer data to evaluate the efficacy of our services.
- Identify customer pain points and areas of opportunity. In our examples, we highlighted that school administrators in the US had trouble purchasing educational technology and international single school customers had a difficult time understanding our technical, US-centric onboarding process.
- Make recommendations for further action. In our examples, we recommended a redesign of the Clever app store purchasing flow and an international MVP focused on a simplified version of Clever for single schools.
You can also check out these resources to help you create a service blueprint:
Sneha Rao and Nick Friebel are both teachers turned designers who work at Clever, an EdTech company focused on unlocking digital learning for all students.
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