In our full-day workshop on service blueprinting (offered at our UX conferences), attendees get hands-on experience with service design and blueprinting. After testing various tools and weighing different considerations (accessibility, familiarity, cost, and effectiveness) for virtual service blueprinting, we created our own template that we share in this article. (We’ve also published a complementary journey-mapping template here.)

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. Service blueprints often act as the next step after customer-journey maps.

Whether you are making a service blueprint on your own, digitizing a physical service blueprint for the first time, or conducting a remote blueprinting workshop, this spreadsheet can act as a starting place.

How to Use this Template

1. Access the template. Copy the Google Spreadsheet template on your own drive (File > Make a copy). Note, you must be logged into your Google account in order make a copy. Alternatively, there are also downloadable Excel and Numbers versions at the bottom of this article.

2. Set up your blueprint. In your own copy of the template, add context to your blueprint with a title, date, and version number (rows 3–5). Identify one scenario (your scope) and its corresponding customer (often a user or persona). Decide how granular the blueprint will be, as well as which direct business goal it will address. While a current-state blueprint gives insight into an existing service, a future-state blueprint offers the opportunity to explore services that do not currently exist.
3. Map customer actions (rows 12–16). These are the steps, choices, activities, and interactions that customers perform while interacting with a service to reach a particular goal. They should be derived from research (using qualitative methods like as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies) or previously completed customer-journey map. Because the blueprint’s focus is the employee experience, not the customer’s experience, this portion does not need to be a fully baked customer-journey map — rather, you can include only the user touchpoints and parallel actions.
4. Map employees’ frontstage and backstage actions (rows 17–26). This step is the core of service-blueprint mapping. Similar to customer actions, frontstage and backstage 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.)

   Feel comfortable adding rows to the template if needed —include all the internal actions that employees take (even if they feel redundant). Doing so can identify redundancies and breakdowns. It is easiest to start with frontstage actions and then move downward to backstage actions.

3. Map support processes and evidence (rows 27–31). Add the process that employees rely on to effectively interact with customers. These processes are the activities involving all employees within the company, including those who don’t typically interact directly with customers. Work your way through each column and layer in the evidence at each customer action. Ask yourself what props and places are encountered along the way.
4. Analyze the blueprint and capture opportunities. Use the tool’s capabilities to mark insights like pain points, time spent, and moments of truth. Consider coloring in red those cells where expectations are not met or unnecessary interactions occur between employees (and document your specific notations in the key to the right). Capture opportunities (rows 32–36) : cells where optimizing the process can reduce total interaction cost (both for users and employees). Ask yourself:
   • Are there any steps that could be eliminated in order to streamline employee processes?
   • Did we miss something at the beginning of the process that might bring efficiency later?
   • What are the triggering factors causing trouble spots?
   • How long do processes take? Are these times appropriate?
   • What are the make-or-break moments?
   • Where are the positive thoughts and emotions expressed and why?
5. Refine and distribute. A blueprint itself is simply a tool that communicates your understanding of internal organizational processes. The fidelity of your blueprint should mirror where you are and what you are trying to achieve. For many, this medium-fidelity, spreadsheet format is good enough. However, if you will be circulating your blueprint to many or presenting it to stakeholders (who react better to high-fidelity artifacts), your next step will be creating a polished representation of your spreadsheet blueprint. This can be done using Lucid Chart (a diagram tool), Sketch or Figma (designer-to-developer tools), Adobe Illustrator or InDesign (design software). In this stage, you’ll want to add secondary components like time, arrows, metrics, and regulations.

Collaborating with Others in This Template

The most productive way to cocreate a blueprint is using the diverge-and-converge technique for steps 3–6. The diverge stage should involve participants individually reading, reflecting on the data, and adding to the map. The converge stage consists of aggregating individual contributions, clustering duplicate additions, and having a group discussion as you streamline and organize inputs in the spreadsheet. This process repeats, diverging-and-converging until the blueprint is filled out and each swim lane has been discussed by the group.

There are two benefits to using this collaboration method to build your blueprint. First, the process used to build the map is just as important as the map itself. The success of a blueprinting initiative has largely to do with how much people believe and use the artifact. By inviting team members, peers from other departments, and stakeholders to participate in the creation of your blueprint, you will increase their buy-in and ownership of the insights and action items.

Second, the blueprint-creation workshop doubles as a research opportunity, since  the frontstage and backstage actors in your blueprint are part of the audience. They will ensure that the artifact you create represents reality, rather than assumptions. (This idea is similar to inviting end users into a journey-mapping workshop to inform or validate the team’s insights.)

When to Use This Template

There are several remote resources and remote-workshop tools available for UX mapping activities. Your needs (accessibility, capabilities, data protection, familiarity, and cost) should dictate the best tool for digital blueprinting. This spreadsheet is an efficient, effective choice for your team if:

• Your organization has strict software policies due to data-protection issues. Most remote whiteboarding tools (often used for mapping activities like blueprinting) store their data in the cloud and are thus off-limits for many financial, healthcare, or government-based businesses. This spreadsheet can be downloaded (in both Numbers and Excel) then uploaded to an organization’s internal, approved spreadsheet tool.
• Your blueprinting team is crossdisciplinary. Unlike other drag-and-drop tools or design-oriented tools, spreadsheets are widely used across many different domains. Using a tool familiar to others has two major benefits. There is no technical onboarding needed. Team members do not need to create an account or learn how the tool works before contributing.
• You made a physical blueprint and want to digitize it. A spreadsheet blueprint works well as a first step in digitizing a sticky-note blueprint created during a workshop. The columns and rows of a spreadsheet can be easily adjusted to accommodate the structure of a service blueprint. Rows align to the blueprint’s four primary swim lanes: customer actions, frontstage actions, backstage actions, support; columns align to the phases of the customer’s journey. The simplicity of this grid structure allows anyone to covert a blueprint to digital form.  The spreadsheet format is a great precursor to a high-fidelity one, better suited if you are still gathering inputs and things are likely to change.
• You’ve struggled with keeping a blueprint relevant in the past. Service blueprints need to be updated to stay relevant and reliable. To be easy to maintain, the blueprint must live in a tool that everyone can easily access. If an edit is needed, anyone can return to the original artifact and easily update it. In contrast, if the artifact is hosted in dedicated, highly specialized software, people may not know how to edit it (even if they did that initial onboarding, chances are they’ll forget how to use the software if they don’t use it regularly) and the responsibility to keep the artifact up to date will fall solely on those few people who are familiar with the program (e.g., a designer).

Remember to include version numbers and the date of last update in the blueprint spreadsheet so to others understand that this artifact is subject to change.

We originally developed this template for use in group exercises in the course on Service Blueprinting when we took the UX Conference virtual. Download our template from the link below and feel free to use it in your own projects. (We also have a full-day course on all aspects of Remote UX Work.)