Introduction

The term, service blueprint, was first described by G.Lyn Shostack, a bank executive in the Harvard business review in 1984. The service blueprint technique was originally used for service design, and it then became useful in diagnosing problems with glitches in operations. 

Service design involves planning and organizing business resources in a bid to improve the employee experience, which will eventually trickle down to the customer’s experience. 

In this guide, we would take a deep dive into the subject of service blueprint and at the end, you will understand the term service blueprint, its important benefits, and the key components of a service blueprint.

What is a service blueprint?

A service blueprint is a  diagram that shows the relationship between different components in an organization, the processes, and how all this put together impacts a customer’s experience across all touchpoints in the customer service journey. 

Service blueprints complement a customer journey map and It is very important in scenarios that include multiple service-related offerings. It requires the effective and seamless coordination of various departments in other to provide a flawless service that cascades from the employee to the customer.

To put it simply, service blueprints must align with business goals and the steps and experiences in a customer journey must be designed in a way that propels them to that goal. For instance, if you are preparing a service blueprint for a restaurant business, it must cover the process of ordering food for home delivery or takeout as well as the procedure for dining in the restaurant.

A service blueprint provides a clear picture or road map showing employees how to offer a specific service to customers, while also showing customers what they should expect when they interact with your brand at every step of the way.

The aim is to create a template that is the standard when offering a service and also garner insight into the service delivery process from the perspective of the customer.

It is important to know that service blueprints vary from a customer journey map which focuses solely on a customer’s experience when they interact with a brand. Service blueprints have a wider scope, as it ties the customer experience to the actions of the employee, which may not necessarily be glaring to the customer.

The must-haves of a service blueprint are;

• A step-by-step detail of a specific customer journey
• The channel-based touchpoints on a one-on-one basis
• The back-end process and actions of the various stakeholders.

You can classify a service blueprint as effective when it creates a shared understanding in the different departments that either procure or offer service to their customers.

Why Is a Service Blueprint Important?

The service blueprint support organizations to effectively understand their services – the resources and the underlying processes guiding their actions and how they affect their customer. Here are a few reasons why a service blueprint is vital:

• They help check the sequence of the process. This aids them in pinpointing bottlenecks, and system errors alongside the effectiveness of the product offered to customers. 
• Blueprints help you to understand what the customer needs and wants are and the implication of service failure on customers.  
• Using service blueprints can help you identify service systems that waste time and resources, are difficult to understand, and are unfriendly to the customer.
• It helps you to assess the cost of offering a service so you understand clearly what is required to offer a service, this helps with your pricing and also allows you to identify areas of improvement. 
• You can also use them to understand cross-functional relationships in your organization and align front-stage and back-stage actions 

Benefits Of Using Service Blueprints

Service blueprints empower an organization to streamline their service processes, by allowing them to visualize each step and interaction in their process. This removes any vagueness or ambiguity and shows areas that need improvement.

Additional benefits include;

1. Scalability and Flexibility: Service blueprints help to replicate the process that delivers results, and because you have recorded the process required for success and captured every detail required in your service blueprint, you can easily expand your business and make any necessary changes as you go.

2. Collaboration and Knowledge Transferability: In a regular work setting, employees and managers can easily lose sight of how each action affects other departments. Service blueprints in this case outline the action of each department and make it easier for them to see how their actions lead to great results. This fosters knowledge sharing, synergy, and effective collaboration across various departments.

3. Monitor Competition: Service blueprints show you where you are in your operations/processes and allow you to benchmark your process against your competition. This makes you better as you are constantly trying to raise the bar by continuously monitoring the process of your competitors and measuring it against your own.

Service blueprints create a clear structure for carrying out and achieving the goals and objectives of an organization. This creates cross-functionality which ultimately improves the lines of communication between customer employees and management.

The result is an in-depth understanding of your customers which allows you to respond to their needs proactively while removing any hitch or difficulty in your processes. 

Essential Elements Of The Service Blueprint

Customer actions: This component is the focal point in the creation of a service blueprint. It consists of the steps, actions, choices, and everything a customer feels when interacting with any aspect of your brand. The customer actions are usually shown chronologically on the top of the service blueprint. 

Visible contact employee actions: This is the next component that appears next to the customer actions and is usually separated by the lines of interaction in the service blueprint diagram. These visible contact employee actions refer to what your frontline employees should do when they interact with a customer physically.

Non-visible contact employee actions: This element refers to the action that takes place behind the scenes and is not visible to the customer. It is the back-end process that fosters interactions with customers either by phone calls, emails, text messages, etc. 

Support processes: These are all the actions and interactions carried out by non-customer-facing employees to support customers-facing employees visible and non-visible to deliver exceptional service. 

Physical evidence: This is placed at the top of the service blueprint diagram. It is displayed right above each point of contact and represents the physical evidence that the service was delivered. 

Lines: Each element of a service blueprint is separated by a line. The first line is the line of interaction depicting the interaction between an organization and its customers. Once this line is crossed the customer evaluates the quality of service received and their perception at this stage determines if the relationship would continue. 

This is followed by the line of visibility and all the aspects that come above the line are visible to the customers and the ones that appear below it aren’t.

The last line displayed on the diagram is the internal line of reaction, which differentiates the actions of the customer non-facing department, and vertical lines that cut across the line of interaction which depicts internal or in-house service encounters.

Arrows: These show the relationship or interdependency of one aspect on another. A single arrow displayed means a one-way exchange while a double arrow shows the relationships/ dependencies. A single arrow indicates a one-way exchange, and a double arrow indicates the need for agreement from both parties or co-dependence. 

Duration: If time is an essential part of your service, you should include a timeline to represent an estimated time frame for each step in your process.

Emotions: Similar to the way a customer journey map reveals the emotions customers and employees go through during each step of their journey, their pain points, and the varying emotions during each step of the service delivery process. The emotions that you want to evoke should be captured in your service blueprint as well.

Policies: This covers the dictates of the law and how it affects your business. It shows what can be changed and what can’t be as you look to find ways to optimize the process for your customer experience advantage.

Metrics: Success metrics can also be included in your service blueprint to track key performance indicators that can tell you your progress via your goals.

How To Understand a Service Blueprint?

A service blueprint can be read in various ways. Here is how to read and understand them based on your intents and purposes.

To understand the customers’ view of the process or their experience; When the customer view or perception is the focus, you read a service blueprint from the left to the right and pay attention to the elements of the customer action category.

This shows you and helps you to understand your customer’s perception, how they decide on a service, what influences their choices, their level of involvement in using the service, and the physical evidence that the service occurred based on their viewpoint.

To understand the role of the contact employees; Read the diagram horizontally, while paying attention to the lines of interaction above and below the lines of visibility. Here you can tell how efficient and effective the process is, which of the employees interact with the customers the most, and the frequency and number of employees involved.

To understand how the various elements of the service process are integrated; In this case, you will need to read and analyze the blueprint vertically. This analysis shows you which tasks and employees are critical to delivering effective service to your customers.

It also helps you identify which of the non-visible back-end activity is essential in supporting the key customer interaction points and how handoffs take place between employees. 

To redesign the service process; To revamp your service process, you would need to analyze the service blueprint as a whole. By doing this you get to understand any difficulty experienced by your customers and employees alike, you can then see how changes in a client’s point of view influence your contact employee’s actions and internal processes.

Finally, you can also use the blueprint to evaluate inefficiencies and discover opportunities for improvement and design.

Conclusion

Service blueprints complement customer journey maps and help organizations to have a holistic pictorial view of how their business is being run in terms of processes and how it delivers the service promise to a customer. Service blueprints show the relationship between an employee-focused and customer-focused process in a single image.

This helps to identify pain points, remove complex interactions, and most importantly create a road map to the organization’s success, which can be replicated successfully and thus help in scaling your business while ensuring that customers have the best experience in the process.

When structured properly, with the right inputs, the service blueprint is a powerful tool – and a great way to bring multiple parties to the table, and align them to specific goals or issues, while providing a detailed end-to-end view of the service being discussed.