Unlock masterful service design

blueprints
How a service design blueprint can provide the
foundation for your business to meet and exceed your
customer’s evolving needs
Sophie Shrimpton

Oct 12, 2020

12 min read

A service design blueprint is a tool that places the customer at the

forefront of the experience. It can help you identify what internal and
external forces most impact your customers’ experience with the brand.
The blueprint is comprised of two different components — front stage and
back stage actions. The front stage actions are directly seen and
experienced by your customer, whether that customer is internal or
external. The back stage actions detail the interactions that indirectly
influence your customer’s experiences with your brand.

To illustrate front and back stage actions, you can think of watching a
performance in a theatre. The audience is the customer who experiences
everything that happens on the stage. The back stage actions are all the
experiences indirectly impacting the performance. For example, the ushers
quickly help the attendees find their seats. The lighting, stage props,
costume, make up, orchestra, and many others may not be directly noticed
by the audience, yet they play an invaluable role in crafting the best
experience for your customers.

Companies most often leverage service design blueprints in order to

identify friction points between the customer and internal people, process,
and technology — the point where front and back stage actions meet.

Let’s break down people, process, and technology into a tangible example.
During the recent pandemic, several flights I had booked were cancelled. I
called the airlines and had a variety of positive and frustrating experiences
related to inefficient people, process, and technologies.

For instance, one airline hung up on me and denied me the ability to speak
with a person. (I called about 5 times in an attempt to talk to a real person. I
pressed 0 and Google searched for other ways to talk to a person to no
avail.) A blueprint would be able to determine what back stage actions need
to be resolved to provide a better front stage interaction. Is it based on lack
of resources? Outdated technology? Process impediments? A combination
of people and technology? Or something else we may discover through
research? (We will get to research soon!)

Conversely, the blueprint also uses qualitative data to highlight exemplary

customer interactions. For example, for another cancelled flight, I was able
to have the airline call me back. This gave me the sense that they were on
my side and wanted to provide me with the best service, leading to my
brand loyalty.

The micro-interactions I experienced with the airline due to my cancelled

flights affected my perception of the brand, and ultimately increased my
brand loyalty to the airline who offered the most seamless experience.
Broadly speaking, brands that place their customer-first who prioritize and
focus on business initiatives related to micro brand interaction tend to have
higher customer retention, increased loyalty, and customers who advocate
for their brand. These actions lead to increased sales, new customers, and
wider followings on social media. In stark contrast, when brands stop
placing customers at the core of the experience, they tend to lose formerly
loyal customers and experience the sunk cost of losing customers they
worked so hard to win due to poor service.

Service design blueprints enable us to see the trickling effects of the micro
interactions, and guide businesses to prioritize decisions related to their
customer’s needs. Blueprints allow us to uncover why a business is unable
to service its patrons effectively and find patterns across various consumer
to brand touch-points.

Why should my company use a service design

blueprint when there are already so many other
tools out there?
Business tools, such as value-stream mapping and process mapping,
enable teams to identify how to improve a process, technology, or internal
customer experience. In comparison, customer experience tools, such as
journey mapping, identify critical moments in a customer’s brand interaction
that either result in increased brand loyalty or a desire to use a competitor.
Service design blueprints combine the outputs of these tools — business
objectives and KPIs, process flows, and customer experience in one
succinct view.

Thanks to these additional tools, a service design blueprint may be closer

than you think. Here’s how you can save time and money by leveraging
existing resources to create a service design blueprint for your company:
Value stream mapping

“Value stream mapping is a flowchart method to illustrate, analyze and

improve the steps required to deliver a product or service.” (Lucidchart).
One of its primary uses is to quantify inefficiencies within your organization
that are most impacting the bottom line. This tool is great to use as you
craft your service design blueprint when you want to optimize internal
process to increase revenue. The value stream map can be a key tool in
helping your organization complete the back-stage actions of the blueprint.
As a bonus, this tool will help your business formulate KPIs to measure the
success of your prioritized initiative design blueprint. In one central view,
you will have quantitative data, qualitative data, KPIs, and the foundation for
how you will improve your business. (Score!)
 Value Stream Map - What is it? How do we use it?

Process mapping
According to Gartner, process mapping “combines process/workflow,
organizational and data/resource views with underlying metrics to provide a
foundation for analyzing value chains, activity-based costs, bottlenecks,
critical paths and inefficiencies.”
Process maps are effective tools because they show end-to-end
processes, can be built rapidly using minimal resources, and can facilitate
alignment on a given process within a team. If your business has this tool,
your service design blueprint has a great foundation for the backstage
actions, especially in regards to the people, process, and technology
portion.

When leveraging this tool as an input to your service design blueprint, I

recommend thinking about the customer as your business moves through
the outlined process. For example, at a restaurant, a customer has to order
the pasta to initiate this flow. Who from your organization is there to support
their experience as they wait? What are the business ramifications and
processes in place if the pasta is underdone or doesn’t meet the customer’s
needs? These questions are answered in journey maps — the front stage
portion of your blueprint.

Journey mapping
Journey maps detail a customer’s emotional state as they interact with a
brand (call customer support to get a refund) or complete a digital task (e-
commerce browsing-purchase experience) over a certain period of time.

Traditionally, journey maps rely on qualitative data and are used by product
teams to improve the customer experience, so extending them to service
design blueprints feels seamless. Both tools are moving toward the same
goal — better customer experiences.

Service design blueprint

Slalom Created Service Design Blueprint

Value-stream mapping, process mapping, and journey mapping are tools

that focus on specific areas on the process or experience to identify
improvements. Value-stream mapping and process mapping take a
business-first lens and are great tools when creating the backstage actions
of the service design blueprint. They tell you what is happening on the
business operational side and can help your business pinpoint inefficiencies
in the backstage processes. On the flip side of the coin, the journey map
takes a customer-first lens and will tell you the impact on your customer
your operational inefficiencies are having. Recall the earlier example of the
airline who forced me to wait on the call for two hours before being
serviced. The backstage inefficiencies could be an antiquated phone
operating system and lack of interconnected technology, resulting
customer service representatives dealing with angry customers who have
waited for two hours. This can negatively impact your attrition rates and
cause loyal customers to leave.

Separately these tools showcase incredible insights to the backstage or

front stage business inefficiencies, yet the connective tissue between the
two stages is imperative to achieve maximum success. Akin to the theatre,
if you poured money to solve a lighting issue but you never solved the
sound issue, the performance wouldn’t be as successful as it could be.

When you combine the front stage and back stage into one succinct view,
you have the power to make more informed and prioritized business
decisions to help your employees, your customers, and ultimately, your
bottom line. The service design blueprint allows you to see the lighting AND
the sound issues on one view so that you can prioritize each of them based
on level of effort, business value, and impact to customer.

Why does it matter to have both business and

customer viewpoints in one document?
In a connected world full of choice, brands and products are commodity
services. Consumers will gravitate and purchase products from companies
who are agile, continue to innovate, and make business decisions based
around their customer’s voice.

“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what

others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”

- Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO

It is instrumental for your business to meet and exceed your customer’s

evolving needs. A brand’s failure to hear the needs of the consumers has
resulted in a fast-track to demise. For example, I remember my father
always complaining about how expensive cabs were. You would sit in the
backseat and watch the bill go up and up and up. Then, Uber came to town
and disrupted the cab industry. No one paying based on the number of
customers, and there was an option for a black car with amenities, which
made me feel like a celebrity. Cab companies failed to innovate and meet
their customer’s needs. Likewise, when Lyft began it seemed strange that
they were going to take on the Goliath of Uber. Nevertheless, Lyft offered a
unique valuable proposition that came at a lesser price than Uber. Lyft was
able to establish its position as another David able to take on Goliath.

In another example, we see movie theatres changing their business model

to offer alcohol to patrons over 21, Facebook replicating its competitor’s
feature to stay relevant — such as copying Snapchat’s story feature, and
Southwest offering free baggage to all customers.

When innovation is paramount to your company’s ability to survive, it is

ever-increasingly important to include your customer in your business
decision. During the pandemic, this message resounds more than ever.
There has been a pivotal shift in how the customer consumes and engages
during COVID-19. Their needs change daily, and they seek brands who can
keep up — from providing Zoom games to giving them Zoom breaks
because Zoom fatigue is real. However, we must be careful when listening
to our customers because what they say they want may not be what they
actually need.

How should I use a service design blueprint?

A service design blueprint gives your company all the pieces to prioritize
and inform business decisions. Once your blueprint is complete, it’s up to
you and your team to implement and realize these business initiatives.

Let’s look at an example at why service design blueprints can be critical

components to rapid agility, customer retention, and your business’s bottom
line.

In 1999, the Swiffer was unveiled. Continuum was hired by Proctor &
Gamble to create a new mopping experience. Gianfranco Zaccai, President
and Chief Design Officer at Continuum, spearheaded research to
understand what people were doing, how much time it took, and why they
were doing it. They used surveys and observational research methods. In
the surveys, people said they wanted large quantities of cleaning supplies.
In observational, the research team discovered that people spent as much
time cleaning their mop as they did their floors AND that people were only
using small quantities of a cleaning supply in practice.

“Development really depends on empathy for what’s going on,”

Gianfranco Zaccai said. “It’s definitely work understanding what people
say, what they do, and what they care about.”

Enter the big idea.

The Swiffer used qualitative and quantitive data points to solve the
customer’s large pain point — cleaning the mop as much as they did their
floors — while enabling the business team to meet and succeed their KPIs.
The key to success was combining both data pieces to formulate one
clear business initiative.
Who should be involved in the creation of a
service design blueprint?
The nature of how a blueprint is created is foundational to success. They
combine multiple disciplines, stakeholders’ perspectives, business needs,
and consumer experiences into one view. Inherently, gathering these
perspectives and acquiring a unified vision on one sheet of paper requires
multi-disciplinary collaboration and communication across your
organization. This is why this tool is so effective — it de-silos organizations
and provides forums for cross-functional teams to communicate and align
on one direction, whereas formerly these teams each had their own
directions, KPIs, and may have been duplicating efforts or re-inventing the
wheel.

As a consultant, I understand it can be very hard to eliminate silos in large-

matrix organizations. That’s why I tell my clients we need a leadership
champion who has some clout in the organization to get behind the service
design blueprint. The leadership champion can rally fractured teams to get
behind the blueprint and can evangelize with other leaders why you are
doing this. They are the ones who will carry the blueprint forward and show
to their executives why it is instrumental in the process.

Sometimes, you may need to work a bit harder to find a leadership

champion. When this happens, I like to show, not tell. Show leaders and
teams what the end deliverable will look like and explain using anecdotal
evidence how it will benefit them. I like to start this process by listening first
to the team’s pain points. They may sound like this:

“Our team’s important projects get de-prioritized often, making it

hard for us to make an impact within our organization.” (process,
people)
“We spend a significant amount of money to create tools that our
 teams don’t adopt.” (technology, process, people)
“Skilled workers spend more time doing task-based work than
problem-solving work.” (technology, process, people)
“Janna solved all of our problems; then she left and we don’t how
what to do.” (process, people)
“Our call centers receive X amount of volume related to problems
customers could solve on their own” (technology, process, people)

Then, you craft your service design blueprint to include and recommend a
solution for each of these pain points that is based on business metrics,
customer metrics, quantitative and qualitative data points, and former
business / customer-centric deliverables. I’ve found using this method has
enabled me to find a leadership champion to advocate and leverage this
deliverable to make and prioritize business decisions.

When this happens, the document becomes a living, breathing evolution

that more and more stakeholders want to use and include their project
team’s KPIs and metics. Project teams start to interact with each other
more, and problems are now being holistically tackled rather than market by
market. Ultimately, your organization shifts and rallies towards unified,
common goals that benefit the entire company rather than fractured goals
that help only a specific project team within a market.

In the past, the customer experience was not often at the core of
innovation, which enables teams to solve problems in siloes. Now, in a
connected world full of choice, brands and products are commodity
services. Customers are impatient because now at their fingertips, they can
browse and compare competitor’s sites, read reviews, get a package
delivered in two hours, and are inundated with your competitor’s products.
Consumers naturally gravitate towards innovation, agility, and brands who
solve their problems from paying too much for cabs to cleaning floors to
selling alcohol during a movie. Customers want to be heard and to feel their
time is valuable through more than lip service.
The next time you’re wondering how to pivot your business to meet and
exceed your customer’s evolving needs, start with a service design
blueprint. I have seen it work time and time again, and come with positive
side-effects such as de-siloing your organization and creating one clear
vision for your company’s future.

Sophie Cummings is a senior UX designer who empowers teams to find

customer-first solutions and works to de-silos product organizations. She
thrives in making analytical insights actionable to all teams through a
customer-first lens. Reach her at [email protected].

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