A service blueprint is a diagram that depicts the connections between various service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are linked to certain customer journey touchpoints.
Consider service plans to be the follow-up to customer journey maps. Blueprints, like customer journey maps, are useful in complex scenarios involving a variety of service offerings. Blueprinting is a great way to create omnichannel, multi-touchpoint experiences that also need a cross-functional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).
A service blueprint is linked to a specific customer journey and the user goals that go along with it. The length of this adventure is up to you. If there are various distinct scenarios that the service can accept, you may have multiple blueprints for the same service. For example, if you run a restaurant, you can have different service patterns for ordering meals for takeout versus dining in the restaurant.
Service blueprints should always have a business aim in mind, such as minimizing redundancies, boosting employee satisfaction, or bringing siloed operations together.
The essential components of a service blueprint
Service blueprints are available in a number of visual styles, some of which are more graphic in nature than others. Regardless of its aesthetic appearance or breadth, every service blueprint has the following essential elements:
Customer actions
Customers go through a series of steps, decisions, activities, and interactions while dealing with a service to achieve a specific goal. Research or a customer journey map is used to determine customer actions.
Frontage actions
Actions that happen right in front of the customer’s eyes. Human-to-human or human-to-computer interactions are possible. The procedures and activities that the contact employee (the individual who interacts with the client) does are known as human-to-human actions. When a consumer interacts with self-service technology, human-to-computer operations are performed (for example, a mobile app or an ATM).
Backstage actions
Steps and activities that take place behind the scenes to support what’s going on onstage. These operations could be carried out by a backstage employee (for example, a kitchen cook) or a frontstage person who performs a task that is not visible to the consumer (e.g., a waiter entering an order into the kitchen display system).
Processes
Internal processes and interactions that assist staff in providing service.
This aspect encompasses anything that must exist in order for the preceding to occur. Credit card verification, pricing, delivery of units from the factory to the store, writing quality testing, and other processes are used by the appliance company.
In a service blueprint, critical parts are grouped together and separated by lines. Check out the following main three lines:
- The line of interaction represents the customer’s direct interactions with the organization.
- All service actions that are visible to the customer are separated from those that are not visible by the line of visibility. Anything that can be seen onstage appears above this line, on the other hand, everything that is not seen appears below it.
- Contact employees are separated from those who do not directly assist interactions with customers/users by the line of internal interaction.
The final layer of a service blueprint is evidence, which consists of the objects and locations with which anyone in the blueprint interacts. Both frontstage and backstage processes and actions can use evidence.
