Service blueprints are diagrams that visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience. They are the primary tool used in service design.
Similar to journey mapping, service blueprinting should be the result of a collaborative process informed by well-defined goals and built on research. Successful service blueprints drive alignment and organizational action.
Effective service blueprinting follows five key high-level steps:
- Find support: Build a core crossdisciplinary team and establish stakeholder support.
- Define the goal: Define the scope and align on the goal of the blueprinting initiative.
- Gather research: Gather research from customers, employees, and stakeholders using a variety of methods.
- Map the blueprint: Use this research to fill in a low-fidelity blueprint.
- Refine and distribute: Add additional content and refine towards a high-fidelity blueprint that can be distributed amongst clients and stakeholders.
5-Step Framework for Service Blueprinting
1. Find support
Level-set and educate on service blueprinting. First, pull together a crossdisciplinary team that has responsibility for a portion of the service and establish stakeholder support for the blueprinting initiative. Support can come from a manager, executives, or clients.
2. Define the goal
Choose a scope and focus. Identify one scenario (your scope) and its corresponding customer. Decide how granular the blueprint will be, as well as which direct business goal it will address. While an as-is blueprint gives insight into an existing service, a to-be blueprint gives you the opportunity to explore future services that do not currently exist.
3. Gather research
Unlike customer-journey mapping where a lot of external research is required, service blueprinting is comprised of primarily internal research.
A. Gather customer research.
Begin by gathering research that informs a baseline of customer actions (or, in other words, the steps and interactions that customers perform while interacting with a service to reach a particular goal). Customer actions can be derived from an existing customer-journey map.
B. Gather internal research.
Choose a minimum of two research methods that put you in direct line of observation with employees. Use a multipronged approach — select and combine multiple methods in order to reveal insights from different angles and job roles:
- Employee interviews
- Direct observation
- Contextual inquiry
- Diary studies
4. Map the blueprint
A. Set up
It’s useful to organize a short workshop session (2–4 hours) to do steps 4 and 5. This helps create a shared understanding amongst your team of allies and ensures that the blueprint remains collaborative and unbiased.
If all workshop participants are in the same physical location, set up by hanging three oversized sticky notes on the wall side by side. Each member should have a pad of post-its. The result of the workshop will be a low-fidelity version of an initial blueprint. If workshop participants are spread across a variety of locations, turn the workshop digital by using a white-boarding tool like Mural.co.
While any mapping method is collaborative at its core, blueprinting can still be done individually. If this is the case, be sure to share your blueprint with stakeholders and peers early and often.
B. Map customer actions.
In a service blueprint, customer actions are depicted in sequence, from start to finish. A customer-journey map is an ideal starting point for this step. Do note that a blueprint’s focus is the employee experience, not the customer’s experience, thus this portion does not need to be a fully baked customer-journey map — rather, you can include only the user touchpoints and parallel actions.
C. Map employees’ frontstage and backstage actions.
This step is the core of a service-blueprint mapping. It is easiest to start with frontstage actions and move downward in columns, following them with backstage actions. Inputs should be pulled from real employee accounts, and validated through internal research. (Remember the old lesson from field research: how things are supposed to be done is rarely how they’re done. You need to discover and document the latter.)
D. Map support processes and evidence.
Add the process that employees rely on to effectively interact with the customer. These processes are the activities involving all employees within the company, including those who don’t typically interact directly with customers. These support processes need to happen in order to deliver the service. Clearly, service quality is often impacted by these below-the-line interaction activities.
Layer in the evidence at each customer’s action step. Work your way through the first 5 steps and ask “what props and places are encountered along the way?” Remember to include evidence that occurs frontstage and backstage.
5. Refine and distribute
Refine by adding any other contextual details as needed. These details include time, arrows, metrics, and regulations (refer to Service Blueprints: Definition for a full list).
The blueprint itself is simply a tool that will help you communicate your understanding of the internal organization processes in an engaging way. At this point, you need to create a visual narrative that will convey the journey and its critical moments, pain points, and redundancies.
A good way to implement this step is to have another workshop with your core team. Having built context and common ground throughout your mapping process, bring them back together and evolve the blueprint into a high-fidelity format.
Best Practices for Creating Successful Service Blueprints
- Limited scope. Similar to customer-journey mapping, we suggest that one blueprint be created for each core service. Blueprints are complex enough already — don’t complicate matters further by trying to capture multiple services in one blueprint.
- Add time and quality measures.
- Services are delivered over time, and a step in the blueprint may take 5 seconds or 5 minutes. Adding time along the top provides a better understanding of the service.
- Quality metrics are experience factors that measure your success or value — the critical moments when the service succeeds or fails in the mind of the service user. For example, what’s the wait time?
- Rooted in research. A service blueprint should be created from primary data sources (i.e., employee’s accounts of their workflows, observations of employee’s performing their work, or work-log sheets).
- Iterate. Service blueprinting should be an iterative process. Take a first pass using findings from personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and experience maps, and then come back to the blueprint to refine it over time.
- Value output and process. The process of bringing people together and visualizing an infrastructure that is otherwise abstract can engage employees and stakeholders from across groups and can spur collaborative conversation and change.
Conclusion
This practical method for building a blueprint could easily apply to other mapping methods. Following these five high-level steps will ensure that you have a team of allies that are engaged, a process based in user research, and a blueprint that aligns internal efforts.
Learn more about creating successful service blueprinting in our full-day course Service Blueprinting.
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