Service design is the action of planning and organizing a concern's resource (people, props, and processes) in order to (one) straight ameliorate the employee'south feel, and (two) indirectly, the customer's experience. Service blueprinting is the principal mapping tool used in the service design process.

What Is a Service Blueprint?

Definition: A service pattern is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital show), and processes — that are straight tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Call back of service blueprints as a function two to customer journey maps. Like to customer-journeying maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or crave a crossfunctional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).

A service blueprint corresponds to a specific customer journey and the specific user goals associated to that journey. This journey can vary in scope. Thus, for the same service, you lot may accept multiple blueprints if at that place are several different scenarios that it can arrange. For example, with a restaurant business, you may have separate service blueprints for the tasks of ordering food for takeout versus dining in the restaurant.

Service blueprints should always marshal to a concern goal: reducing redundancies, improving the employee experience, or converging siloed processes.

Benefits of Service Blueprinting

Service blueprints give an organization a comprehensive understanding of its service and the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — that brand it possible. Focusing on this larger understanding (alongside more typical usability aspects and individual touchpoint design) provides strategic benefits for the business.

Blueprints are treasure maps that help businesses discover weaknesses. Poor user experiences are frequently due to an internal organizational shortcoming — a weak link in the ecosystem. While we can chop-chop empathize what may be incorrect in a user interface (bad design or a broken button), determining the root crusade of a systemic issue (such as corrupted information or long wait times) is much more hard. Blueprinting exposes the big pic and offers a map of dependencies, thus allowing a concern to discover a weak leak at its roots.

In this same way, blueprints help place opportunities for optimization. The visualization of relationships in blueprints uncovers potential improvements and ways to eliminate back-up. For example, data gathered early on in the customer's journey could possibly exist repurposed afterwards on backstage. This approach has three positive furnishings: (1) customers are delighted when they are recognized the 2d fourth dimension — the service feels personal and they salve time and effort; (two) employee time and try are non wasted regathering data; (3) no run a risk of inconsistent information when the same question isn't asked twice.

Blueprinting is nigh useful when coordinating circuitous services because it bridges crossdepartment efforts. Often, a department's success is measured past the touchpoint it owns. Yet, users meet many touchpoints throughout i journey and don't know (or care) which section owns which touchpoint. While a department could encounter its goal, the big-picture, arrangement-level objectives may not exist reached. Blueprinting forces businesses to capture what occurs internally throughout the totality of the customer journey — giving them insight to overlaps and dependencies that departments alone could non see.

NNg Service Blueprint Example
An case blueprint for an apparatus retailer

Key Elements of a Service Blueprint

Service blueprints take different visual forms, some more than graphic than others. Regardless of visual form and scope, every service blueprint comprises some key elements:

  • Customer deportment

Steps, choices, activities, and interactions that customer performs while interacting with a service to reach a particular goal. Customer actions are derived from research or a customer-journey map.

In the our blueprint for an appliance retailer, customer actions include visiting the website, visiting the store and browsing for appliances, discussing options and features with a sales assistant, appliance purchase, getting a delivery-date notification, and finally receiving the appliance.

  • Frontstage actions

Actions that occur direct in view of the customer. These actions can exist human-to-human or human being-to-calculator actions. Human-to-human actions are the steps and activities that the contact employee (the person who interacts with the customer) performs. Human-to-figurer actions are carried out when the customer interacts with self-service technology (for example, a mobile app or an ATM).

In our appliance company example, the frontstage actions are directly linked to customer's actions: the store worker meets and greets customers, a chat banana on the website informs them which units take which features, a trader partner contacts customers to schedule commitment.

Note that there is non always a parallel frontstage action for every customer touchpoint. A customer can interact straight with a service without encountering a frontstage player, similar it's the example with the appliance commitment in our instance blueprint. Each time a client interacts with a service (through an employee or via technology), a moment of truth occurs. During these moments of truth, customers approximate your quality and make decisions regarding hereafter purchases.

  • Backstage deportment

Steps and activities that occur backside the scenes to support onstage happenings. These actions could be performed by a backstage employee (e.g., a cook in the kitchen) or past a frontstage employee who does something non visible to the customer (e.g., a waiter entering an social club into the kitchen display arrangement).

In our appliance-company example, numerous backstage actions occur:  A warehouse employee inputs and updates inventory numbers into the point-of-auction software; a shipping employee checks the unit'southward condition and quality; a chat assistant contacts the factory to confirm pb times; employees maintain and update the visitor's website with the newest units; the marketing team creates advertising material.

  • ​ Processes

Internal steps, and interactions that support the employees in delivering the service.

This element includes anything that must occur for all of the above to accept place. Processes for the appliance visitor include credit-card verification, pricing, delivery of units to the store from the manufacturing plant, writing quality tests, and then on.

In a service blueprint, primal elements are organized into clusters with lines that separate them. There are 3 primary lines:

  1. The line of interaction depicts the direct interactions between the customer and the arrangement.
  2. The line of visibility separates all service activities that are visible to the customer from those that are not visible. Everything frontstage (visible) appears above this line, while everything backstage (not visible) appears below this line.
  3. The line of internal interaction separates contact employees from those who do not direct support interactions with customers/users.

The last layer of a service blueprint is evidence, which is made of the props and places that anyone in the blueprint has an exchange with. Evidence tin be involved in both frontstage and backstage processes and actions.

In our apparatus case, evidence includes the appliances themselves, signage, physical stores, website, tutorial video, or email inboxes.

NNg Service Blueprint Key Elements Diagram
Cardinal elements of service design

Secondary Elements to Include in a Service Design

Blueprints can be adapted to context and business organization goals past introducing the additional elements every bit needed:

Arrows

Arrows are a key element of service blueprinting. They point relationships, and more than importantly, dependencies. A unmarried pointer suggests a linear, one-manner substitution, while a double pointer suggests the need for agreement and codependency.

Time

If time is a primary variable in your service, an estimated duration for each customer activeness should be represented in your blueprint.

Regulations or Policy

Any given policies or regulations that dictate how a process is completed (nutrient regulations, security policies, etc.) can exist added to your blueprint. This information will allow us to understand what tin can and cannot be changed as we optimize.

Emotion

Similar to how a user'south emotion is represented throughout a customer-journey map, employees' emotions can be represented in the blueprint. (Emotion is shown through the green and red faces in the example beneath.) Where are employees frustrated? Where are employees happy and motivated? If you already have some qualitative data regarding points of frustration (perchance obtained from internal surveys or other methods), y'all can use them in the blueprint to help focus the design process and more easily locate pain points.

Metrics

Any success metric that tin provide context to your blueprint is a benefit, particularly if buy-in is the pattern'south goal. An example may be the time spent on various processes, or the financial costs associated with them. These numbers will assist the business place where time or coin are wasted due to miscommunication or other inefficiencies.

NNg Service Blueprint Additional Elements Diagram
Likewise the key elements, organizations may choose to add other elements to their blueprints, as appropriate.

Determination

Service blueprints are companions to customer-journey maps: they help organizations see the big picture of how a service is implemented by the company and used by the customers. They pinpoint dependencies betwixt employee-facing and customer-facing processes in the same visualization and are instrumental in identifying pain points, optimizing complex interactions, and ultimately saving coin for the organization and improving the experience for its customers.

To learn more, check out our full day form Service Blueprinting.