IDEO describes Service Design as a craft of bringing together human, digital, and physical interactions to create a truly differentiated experience for customers. How is this achieved? Through the use of a service blueprint that pulls together the business’ processes, systems and tools, all centred around its customers. This ensures that every interaction at each touchpoint – whether it is digital, physical or human, is not just a transaction, but also a meaningful service.
And given its human-centered approach, service design places a huge emphasis on empathy, requiring a deep understanding of the needs, wants, and behaviours of the end-user, the customer. By walking in the customers’ shoes, service designers are able to create experiences that are not just efficiency, but also emotionally engaging and memorable, thereby ensuring businesses remain at the forefront of their customers’ minds.
And that is why to design a service blueprint, we always start with the customer journey.
Service Blueprints As An Extension Of Customer Journey Maps
The customer journey maps out all the stages a customer goes through when interacting with a service, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. Understanding this journey is crucial because it highlights the moments that matter most to the customer.
Through the journey map, service designers gain valuable insights into customer expectations, pain points and needs at each journey stage. With this information, they can then effectively layer on the necessary processes across various teams (“frontstage” interactions and “backstage” processes) to deliver the desired customer experience.
Essential Components of a Service Blueprint
- Customer Actions – These are the steps a customer takes throughout their journey, often interacting with various artefacts such as confirmation emails and SMS notifications.
- Line of Interaction – This demarcates the space between customer actions and frontstage activities.
- Frontstage Actions – This encompasses all elements the customer directly interacts with; they are activities that are visible to the customer
- Line of Visibility – This line separates the visible frontstage actions from the invisible backstage actions performed by customer-facing staff.
- Backstage Actions – These are the behind-the-scenes activities and processes undertaken by teams at the backend that remain unseen by the customer.
- Line of Internal Interaction – This boundary separates support processes within the broader organisation from those directly involved in service delivery.
- Support Processes – These are tasks carried out by various departments within the organisation or by external partners to facilitate the overall service.
The complexity of the service blueprint can vary, potentially detailing specific departmental processes or even the roles and inter-team workflows that link with customer actions.