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What is a service blueprint?
A service blueprint is a template that maps and visualizes the relationships between different service components along the customer journey. It goes beyond the customer, to include the people, tools (physical and digital), and processes that all have an impact on the customer experience.
Keep reading to find out more about how to use our free service design template to improve your customer experience.
Why is service design important?
Service design is important because it helps a business plan and utilize its resources in the best possible way. When designed correctly, good service design can directly improve the employee’s experience, and indirectly, the customer’s experience.
What are the components of a service blueprint template?
We’ve created a free service design template you can use as the basis of your own service blueprint map. The main components of the template list anywhere service design has an opportunity to make an impact.
Customer actions
These are all the steps, decisions and interactions your customer makes from awareness through to purchase. Completing a customer journey map first will provide you with a complete list of customer actions for this section.
Onstage actions
Every interaction a customer has with a real person, or online service, is considered the front of house. So, this would include chatting with a salesperson in-store as well as interacting with a chatbot or customer service rep online.
Backstage actions
Any action that is performed for the benefit of the customer, but out of sight, is considered back of house. These actions may include an item being picked and packed in a warehouse, or a refund being processed in the system.
Support processes
Processes are normally things that benefit or help the employee complete their job. These processes range from pricing through to inventory levels.
Creating a service blueprint using a free template
It’s easy to create your own service blueprint with our free customizable service design template. Conceptboard’s virtual whiteboard makes it easy for teams to collaborate online on any project.
- Open the free template below and invite team members to collaborate online with you.
- Pick a customer experience that you will base the exercise on.
- Plot all the actions that a customer takes as sticky notes on the template
- Next, add in the other elements to the journeys, including the staff interactions, back of house actions and processes involved.
- Use the line connector tool to map out the lines of interactions, internal actions and lines of visibility.
- Use arrows to show connectors, dependencies and relationships between elements.
What is the difference between service design template and journey map?
While we often take the time to think about the customer journey to see what can be improved, we rarely take time to map out our entire business. And this is the fundamental difference between service design and customer journey maps. The latter documents the surface-level customer interactions, while service blueprints document your unique collection of systems, policies, and actors that make up your business.
Blueprinting puts the customer experience at the center, then unpacks every aspect of it to understand and improve the way the organization supports that journey.
Example of service blueprint for a restaurant
If you want to see what a completed service blueprint looks like, check out this example of a service design template for a restaurant.
As you can see, service blueprints are great follow-ups to customer journey maps. They help you see the bigger customer service picture across the whole organization. If you are having trouble streamlining and improving the customer journey, visualising the process and understanding the pain points and successes will help improve the customer experience, as well as employee satisfaction.
Keep up the momentum and check out these additional guides to customer success:
- Build a product customers love using the Product vision board template
- Create a Customer empathy map in 6 easy steps
- Find your ideal customer with the User persona
Give Conceptboard a try and see how easy it is to collaborate and brainstorm with your team online.
