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.
Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to customer journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or require a cross-functional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).
A service blueprint corresponds to a specific customer journey and the specific customer goals associated with 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, similar to having different customer journey maps for different customer personas. 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 your company’s goals: reducing redundancies, improving the customer and employee experience, or converging siloed processes.
What is the Makeup of a Service Blueprint?
As with the customer journey maps that enables your company to understand its customer’s experience with your brand and touch points, service blueprints can help your organization understand the underlying resources and processes – seen and unseen to your customer – and enable your company to see the bigger picture.
Ask yourself: Are the processes and procedures that have been put in place by your company satisfying the needs and pains of your customers? Are they making the customer’s journey with your brand better or worse? While certain steps in your company may seem necessary, they may be frustrating the customer, are they really needed?
Figure 1: Example of a Service Blueprint
Key Elements of a Service Blueprint
Customer Actions: The steps the customers take while interacting with your organization’s touchpoints or during their customer experience, such as the website or social media platforms.
Frontstage Actions: All the actions that your company takes that are witnessed by the customer, the who and what aspect of the interaction, such as an employee greeting a customer or providing them with information, completing a customer order or responding to e-mails.
Backstage Actions: All the actions your employees take that are not visible to the customer, such as the employees carrying out the processes , reviewing the customer's submission for approval or even packaging the customer's purchase.
Support Processes: Internal processes and tools that enable your company and employees to deliver the service. Examples range from automated emails, push notifications, or third party vendors or carriers.
Physical Evidence: Tangible elements that your customers/ employees come in contact with, that has the potential to influence customer perceptions of the service encounter e.g. physical store, receipt, uniforms, website and branded items.
Line of Visibility: Line that separates front-stage and back-stage actions.
Line of Interaction which separates customer actions from service provider actions
Line of Internal which separates the back office and the support process
Benefits of Service Blueprinting
Service blueprints give your organization a comprehensive understanding of its service and the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — that make it possible. Focusing on this larger understanding (alongside more typical usability aspects and individual touchpoint design) provides strategic benefits for your company or business.
Blueprints are treasure maps that help your company discover weaknesses. Poor customer or user experiences are often due to an internal organizational 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 your company to discover a weak leak at its roots.
In this same way, blueprints help identify opportunities for optimization. The visualization of relationships in blueprints uncovers potential improvements and ways to eliminate redundancy. For example, information gathered early on in the customer’s journey could possibly be repurposed later on backstage. This approach has three positive effects: (1) customers are delighted when they are recognized the second time — the service feels personal and they save time and effort; (2) employee time and effort are not wasted regathering information; (3) no risk of inconsistent data when the same question isn’t asked twice.
Blueprinting is most useful when coordinating complex services because it bridges cross department efforts. Often, a department’s success is measured by the touchpoint it owns. However, customers 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 your company 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.
Conclusion
Service blueprints are companions to customer-journey maps: they help your organization see the big picture of how a service is implemented and used by your customers. They pinpoint dependencies between employee-facing and customer-facing processes in the same visualization and are instrumental in identifying pain points, optimizing complex interactions, and ultimately saving money for your organization and improving the experience for your customers.
From developing a comprehensive blueprint of your company’s service and helping you understand the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user —we at Kmora Simbeatik can handle all your customer experience and service needs.
Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how your company delivers a customer experience.
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