Service Blueprinting is the most commonly used tool in association with Service Design. Used to highlight avenues of efficiencies within current service experiences, Service Blueprinting offers a visual avenue to enhance the customer and employee experience.

A service blueprint is essentially the extension of a customer journey map that includes the support pieces necessary to deliver the customer facing experience. Native to every service blueprint, this then requires a few components.

Service Design starts with the goal of increasing satisfaction in the quality and efficiencies between services and customer expectation utilizing both the front stage (customer facing) players and backstage (behind the line of visibility) players.

This ties together your customer touchpoints with the internal infrastructure, process, culture, and employee experience that holistically impact a service experience.

Intrinsically from there, we begin to then understand the Service Blueprint offers the visualization of the Service Design process.

A Service Blueprint graphically maps the holistic process of a customer’s service experience inclusive of both the point of interaction, customer facing touchpoints, and the actions behind the line of visibility that interact continuously to offer the service experience.

A service blueprint allows for more transparency in current service processes, but is also a way to be able to create new services and identify potential challenge areas by testing the process on paper before implementation.

To begin to understand service blueprinting, we must understand the core components of a Service Blueprint including:

1.      The Scope of a Service Blueprint--The Service Blueprint maps the end to end process of a customer interaction with an organization holistic of both front and back stage components. The blueprint includes the customer facing touchpoints and internal touchpoints per the process, but dives deeper into interactivity as well. 

2.      Customer Facing Touchpoints--The service blueprint is essentially the extension of a customer journey map that includes the support pieces necessary to deliver the customer facing experience. 

3.      The Backstage Players--The customer interactions in organizations are equivalent to the tip of the iceberg sticking out of the water. There may be a whole mountain of information and process below that provides the pathway to that experience. 

4.      Qualitative & Quantitative Measures--The customer interactions in organizations are equivalent to the tip of the iceberg sticking out of the water. There may be a whole mountain of information and process below that provides the pathway to that experience. 

To learn more around the above pieces of a Service Blueprint and additional references, download the full report here.