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After diving into Customer Journey Mapping and why it’s such a game-changer for understanding user experiences, let’s move on to another key tool: the Service Blueprint. While Customer Journey Mapping gives us a solid overview of the customer’s path, a Service Blueprint deepens this understanding by focusing on the internal processes that support or hinder those journeys.
When mapping out customer journeys, we often identify pain points; those frustrating moments where users encounter obstacles. Resolving these issues is essential, but it's equally important to understand the internal processes behind them. What might appear as a simple obstacle is often tied to deeper organisational challenges.
Take, for example, a lengthy registration process on a website. Sure, simplifying the interface might help, but if the real issue is an inefficient backend or an outdated system, and this remains unaddressed, the issue is likely to persist. This is where Service Blueprints come into play and can make a difference. Service Blueprints help you in addressing opportunities to improve and create a valuable digital experience or product.
A Service Blueprint is a visual representation that maps out the connections between the customer journey and the internal processes that support it. It allows teams to visualise how front-end experiences are linked to back-end activities, uncovering the hidden complexities that can impact the user experience.
A theatre production is a perfect metaphor for explaining a Service Blueprint. And if you know me, you’ll know my love for theatre runs deep. It’s not just the stage performance that grips the audience: it’s the combination of that performance and the lights, sound, and tech working all together that makes the magic happen. In a Service Blueprint, we connect what the audience (or customer) sees with all the supporting elements behind the scenes that make the experience seamless and run smoothly.
The frontstage is the stage where the audience (the customers) watches the performance; their direct interactions with the service, including digital touchpoints like websites, apps, customer support interactions, and marketing materials.
In the backstage, the stage crew operates the lights, sound, and other technical elements that create a seamless experience. This parallels the internal processes and technology; such as APIs and service providers that support customer interactions.
Then, we have the behind-the-scenes activities, much like the unseen elements that ensure a production runs smoothly. These include budget considerations, compliance with regulations, and the communication between different departments.
Just as a great show requires coordination between all these elements, a positive customer experience is influenced by the alignment of both front-end and back-end operations and a Service Blueprint will help you out identifying how to get to that.
So, how do we apply service blueprinting? We take the following steps:
We start by identifying stakeholders and the scope of the service. Are we focusing on technical infrastructure or broader organisational processes? Defining the scope ensures we understand the target audience and the journeys we want to improve.
Using the methods we covered in our Customer Journey Mapping article, we map out customer interactions, touchpoints, and channels. This defines the frontstage: everything the customer directly experiences.
However, we sometimes find that recruiting participants can be a hurdle in the process. You don’t necessarily have to start with mapping the user journey first, which can help make project timelines more realistic. It’s perfectly acceptable to begin by interviewing stakeholders within the organisation to understand and map backstage operations while waiting to conduct user interviews. This approach allows for a more informed and comprehensive blueprint from the outset. Nevertheless, the need for actual user input remains crucial to ensure the blueprint accurately reflects the user experience.
Next, we layer the interactions of professional users that directly support the customer journey and are seen by the customer. These are the roles that bridge the frontstage and the backstage. Think of customer service representatives or sales support.
Now, we dig into the backstage: while unseen by the customer, backstage activities are critical to service delivery. Together with our clients, we map out the backstage activities or processes that are connected to the identified steps in the frontstage:
We then draw a "line of visibility" to separate what the customer sees from internal operations and connect the frontstage steps with the related backstage processes. This step highlights how behind-the-scenes processes support customer-facing actions, like how placing an online order triggers payment and delivery processes in the background.
In this crucial step, we leverage the service blueprint to pinpoint inefficiencies and misalignments in existing services. For new services, our focus shifts to optimising the ideal customer journey, ensuring that internal processes are fully prepared to support this seamless flow. The true value of a service blueprint lies in its ability to drive actionable insights; by identifying bottlenecks and opportunities, we can design a better digital product that truly meets user needs.
To ensure the blueprint is accurate, we validate it with stakeholders from different departments. This helps to ensure that everyone’s on the same page and that the blueprint reflects both customer journeys and internal processes.
To maintain its value, we encourage clients to keep their service blueprints updated as processes evolve, technology advances, or customer needs change. To effectively use these blueprints, it’s essential to adopt them within your organisation, integrating them into your Customer Journey optimisation efforts and using tools that make it easy to adjust them at a later moment in time. Alternatively, partnering with an agency like ours, which offers ongoing support and guidance (in our case the optimise & grow phase), can ensure that your service blueprints remain relevant and impactful.
Some remarks
Building Service Blueprints requires meticulous attention to detail. While this process can be labour-intensive, the comprehensive mapping of all interactions becomes invaluable when preparing to design a new digital product. Every detail serves as a critical reference point throughout the design process.
"Understanding both sides of your service helps you make smarter decisions and build better products"
Aside from the fact that Service Blueprints help us to gain a better understanding of the current customer journey and problems that might occur, they more importantly help us in the process of creating and designing for new services or solutions. We recently applied the usage of Service Blueprints at our project with NEN. By transforming our customer journey research into Service Blueprints, we helped the organisation in the process of creating a shared understanding of the needs for backstage alignment. We aligned the blueprints with their internal goals and their technical plans to create an ideal flow. The approach helped us to ensure that all stakeholders would move into the same direction and that the product concept was optimally aligned with user needs, organisational objectives and technical capabilities. With that internal alignment we were able to move from customer journeys to a concrete product definition.
As we are looking for a more holistic view on the user experience, combining Customer Journey Mapping and Service Blueprints will help you out. Like a theatre production where every element, onstage and offstage, must work in sync to deliver a great show, understanding both sides of your service helps you make smarter decisions and build better products.
By applying these tools, you’ll create products that not only delight customers but also align your teams and processes.
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