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Resources IT & Operations What is a Service Blueprint: Brief Definition and Examples

What is a Service Blueprint: Brief

Definition and Examples
Updated on: 08 October 2023 | 16 min read

Over the last few decades, service blueprints have evolved as a

useful method to address the many challenges in service
design and innovation. It was first introduced by Lynn
Shostack, a banking executive in 1982 in the Harvard Business
Review.
In this guide, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the topic of
service blueprints; at the end of it, you’ll know what is a service
blueprint, how to create one as well as how to read one. You
can start blueprinting your own service process right away with
the templates provided.
What is a Service Blueprint
Key Elements of the Service Blueprint
Benefits of a Service Blueprint
Applications of a Service Blueprint
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How to Read the Service Blueprint

How to Create a Service Blueprint Using Creately
Service Blueprint Examples
Ready to Create Your Own Service Blueprint?

What is a Service Blueprint

The service blueprint is a diagram/ map that visualizes a
service offering accurately. It provides a clear picture of the
service process to those who are involved in service production
as well as service consumption.
Its purpose is to help understand the service delivery process
from the customers’ perspective in order to assist the service
design and improvement processes. It highlights the complexity
and divergence of the service process and helps to upgrade
the efficiency and effectiveness in customer service.
They are particularly used during the design stage of service
development to break a service down to its logical components
such as points of customer contacts, physical evidence, etc.
and analyze the steps in the service process in detail.
They are usually represented with a diagram with swimlanes
which represent the different categories of the service
blueprint.
Service Blueprint vs. Customer Journey Map
Customer journey map and service blueprints are two
complementary methods used in service/ product design.
Customer journey maps visualize the customer experience
across different touchpoints along with what they are doing,
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thinking, and feeling. It focuses more on the surface customer

experience and reveals less service process details.
On the other hand, service blueprints offer a detailed look at
the service delivery process across the different touchpoints,
including the onstage and backstage contact employee
actions.
So the service blueprint offers more information on the internal
processes and support systems that deliver the service to the
customers more than the experience of the customer. The
blueprint uses the customer journey as a starting point.

Effectively visualize your services to gain a more holistic

perspective and better understand all of the moving
parts with Creately.
Create a Service Blueprint

Key Elements of the Service Blueprint

The service blueprint distinguishes between onstage and
backstage employee activities which are represented with its
key components.

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Click on the template to edit it online

Customer actions: this component is central to the creation of

the service blueprint and therefore is laid out first. It includes
the steps, actions, choices, and interactions the customer
performs while evaluating, purchasing or using the service
delivery process. These actions are displayed chronologically
across the top of the blueprint.
Onstage/ visible contact employee actions: this component
appears on the diagram after customer actions, separated by
the line of interaction. These actions include what frontline
contact employees do when they encounter customers face-
to-face.
Backstage/ invisible contact employee actions: this refers to
the backstage or behind the scene actions taken by contact
employees that are not visible to the customer. They include
non-visible interactions with the customer such as telephone
calls and other activities backstage contact employees carry
out to support the onstage activities.

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Support processes: this includes all the actions, interactions,

internal services carried out by individuals or units (not contact
employees) within the company to support contact employees
deliver the service. They are not visible to the customers.
Physical evidence: this comes at the top of the diagram and
represents the physical evidence of the service. They are
typically listed above each point of contact. For example, the
physical evidence of a face-to-face meeting can be listed as
office decor.
Lines: Each component of the service blueprint is separated by
a line. First comes the line of interaction which represents
direct interaction between the customer and the organization;
every time the line of interaction is crossed by a link from the
customer to the contact employee, a moment of truth occurs.
During these moments of truths, the customer judges the
quality of the service and makes decisions about future
purchases.
Then comes the line of visibility. All components that come
above this line are visible to the customer while the ones that
come below it are invisible.
The last is the internal line of interaction. This separates
contact employee activities from other service support
activities and people. Vertical lines cutting across the line of
internal interaction represent internal service encounters.
Arrows: These represent the relationships/ dependencies. A
single arrow indicates a one-way exchange, and a double arrow
indicates the need for agreement from both parties or
codependence.

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Some secondary elements you can include in a service

blueprint are,
Time: If time is an essential part of your service, you can
use a timeline to represent the estimated time duration for
each step of the process.
Emotions: Similar to the way a customer journey map
reveals the emotions customers go through during each
step of their journey, you can indicate the various emotional
states your employees are in during each step of the
service delivery process.
Metrics: You can also include success metrics in your
service blueprint to track the progress toward your goals.

Benefits of a Service Blueprint

The service blueprint helps organizations to effectively
understand their services – the resources and the underlying
processes. There are several other benefits of service
blueprints
Streamlined service delivery: A service blueprint provides
a clear overview of the different processes, activities, and
touchpoints involved in delivering a service. It helps
organizations identify redundancies, bottlenecks, and areas
of inefficiency, allowing for process optimization and
streamlining. A service blueprint also helps check the
process’s logical flow and evaluate its effectiveness and
productivity.
Enhanced customer experience: Service blueprints allow
organizations to identify pain points and areas for
improvement in the customer journey. It helps to
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understand customer needs and wants and the impact of a

failed delivery service. By mapping out the entire service
process, organizations can identify moments of truth,
optimize interactions, and design better customer
experiences.
Improved service design and innovation: By visualizing the
service process, organizations can spot opportunities for
innovation and new service offerings. Using a service
blueprint, you can isolate service systems that are slow,
repetitive, overly complex, waste resources and are toxic to
the customer. Service blueprints enable service designers
to identify areas where technology, automation, or new
approaches can be implemented to enhance the service
and provide additional value to customers.
Measurement and performance evaluation: Service
blueprints provide a framework for measuring service
performance and evaluating key metrics at each step of the
process. By tracking and analyzing data related to service
delivery, organizations can identify areas for improvement,
set benchmarks, and monitor progress over time. A service
blueprint helps with measuring the cost of service delivery
and identifying opportunities for improving the service
delivery system.
Cross-functional collaboration: Service blueprints involve
multiple stakeholders and departments, facilitating team
collaboration and communication. It helps break down silos
and fosters a shared understanding of the service process,
allowing for coordinated efforts in delivering an exceptional
service experience. You can also use them to understand
cross-functional relationships in your organization and align
front-stage and back-stage actions.
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Training and employee empowerment: Service blueprints

can be used as training tools for employees, providing a
step-by-step guide to service delivery. They help
employees understand their roles and responsibilities and
how their actions impact the service experience. This
empowers employees to make informed decisions and
deliver consistent, high-quality service.
Service recovery and problem-solving: When service
failures or issues occur, service blueprints serve as a
valuable tool for identifying the root causes and developing
solutions. By pinpointing the specific steps and touchpoints
where problems arise, organizations can implement
effective service recovery strategies and prevent similar
issues in the future.

Applications of a Service Blueprint

Service blueprints have various applications across industries
and sectors. Here are some common applications of service
blueprints,
1. Service Design: Service blueprints are used to understand
the customer journey, identify pain points, and design
customer-centric experiences.
2. Customer Experience Management: Service blueprints
help manage and improve customer experiences by aligning
processes, policies, and resources to meet customer
expectations.
3. Process Optimization: Service blueprints identify
inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and redundant activities,
improving efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing service
quality.
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4. Service Innovation: Service blueprints act as a foundation

for identifying opportunities and implementing innovative
solutions to enhance the service experience.
5. Employee Training and Onboarding: Service blueprints are
used as training tools to help employees understand their
roles, responsibilities and how their actions contribute to
the overall service experience.
6. Service Recovery: Service blueprints assist in analyzing
service failures, identifying root causes, and developing
effective strategies for service recovery.
7. Cross-functional Collaboration: Service blueprints
promote collaboration and communication among
departments by providing a shared understanding of the
service process and interdependencies.
8. Performance Measurement and Evaluation: Service
blueprints provide a framework for measuring and
evaluating service performance, allowing organizations to
identify areas for improvement, set benchmarks, and
monitor progress.

How to Read the Service Blueprint

A service blueprint can be read in multiple ways. In this section,
we will show you how to read and understand them for
different purposes.
To understand the customers’ view of the process or of
their experience; read the service blueprint from left to
right while tracking the elements in the customer action
category. You can understand the view of the customer by
focusing on how they initiate the service, the choices they
make, how involved they are in creating the service, the
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physical evidence of the service from their point of view

and whether the evidence is consistent with the strategy
and positioning of the evidence.
To understand the role of the contact employees; read the
diagram horizontally focusing on the activities that are
directly above and below the line of visibility. Here you can
look into how effective and efficient the process is, who
interacts with the customer and how often they do so and
whether there is one or several people to deal with a
customer.
To understand how the various elements of the service
process are integrated; Here you need to analyze the
blueprint vertically. This analysis will help you identify
which employees and which tasks are essential to
effectively deliver the service to customers. Focus on what
actions are performed backstage to assist the critical
customer interaction points, what the supporting actions
are, and how the handoffs between employees are taking
place.
To redesign the service process; Here you can analyze the
service blueprint as a whole. By doing so you can
understand its complexity, how it can be changed and how
changes in the customer’s point of view may affect the
contact employee actions and internal processes. You can
also use the blueprint to evaluate inefficiencies and failure
points and identify opportunities for improvement and
redesign.

How to Create a Service Blueprint Using

Creately
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The process of building a service blueprint itself has many

benefits. It’ll help develop a shared vision of the service
process among everyone involved, identify complexities of the
service that were never apparent and understand the roles and
responsibilities of the task owners.
The development of the service blueprint requires a cross-
functional team consisting of members from marketing,
operations, HR, and in some cases, even customers.
You can simplify the process of creating a service blueprint by
using an online diagramming tool like Creately. It enables you
and your team to work on the same canvas with infinite space
in real-time.
And using comments and discussion threads you can monitor
feedback from stakeholders. There are many pre-made
templates as well, and you can use them right away to start
your project.
Step 1: Identify the service process to be blueprinted
Whether it is a main process or sub-process, it’s important to
have identified what it is beforehand. Once you have
determined the underlying purpose for creating the service
blueprint, you can identify which process to start with. Focus
on blueprinting one process at a time.
Gather everyone on your team to the Creately platform to
brainstorm and identify the service process. Use Creately’s
integrations with Microsoft Teams to conduct online meetings
seamlessly. Track the participation of the team with multi-
cursors for any number of participants.
Step 2: Identify the customer segment
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Different customer segments may have different needs and

requirements, therefore your service may change from segment
to segment. If your service process varies across different
customer segments you cater to, then it’s important to
blueprint these processes separately.
Dedicate the second step to identifying the particular customer
segment the identified service process caters to. Once that’s
specified, you need to get an idea about the interactions of the
customers during each step of the process. For this you can
use Creately’s pre-made templates to get a quick start.
A good way to understand the customer interactions or the
choices and the actions they perform across the various
service touchpoints is the customer journey map. Since the
service blueprint is primarily about the employee actions, your
customer journey map for this step doesn’t have to be a
comprehensive one – one that highlights the touchpoints and
the parallel actions would suffice.
Customer Journey Map
Customer Journey Map (Click on the template to edit it online)

However, it is important to thoroughly understand who the

customer is, which may require considerable research.
If you already have customer profiles for different segments,
you can use them at this point; if not consider creating one for
they may come in handy when you are blueprinting service
processes anytime.
Customer Profile
Customer Profile (Click on the template to edit it online)

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This will help you get an idea about the process from the point
of view of the customer. And it will also help you identify and
avoid process steps that have no customer impact.
Step 3: Map onstage/ backstage contact employee
actions
This step starts with mapping the service process from the
point of view of the contact employee both frontstage and
backstage. You can question operations employees to gather
the relevant information on the activities they perform in full
view of the customer and which are carried out behind the
scenes.
If technology is involved in delivering the service, you can map
the actions on the technology interface.
Ask your team members to provide their input. Use sticky
notes, shapes, notes and data panel to note down all
information and to start sketching out the service blueprint.
Step 4: Link contact activities to needed support
functions
Map the support processes the employees rely on to carry out
the actions you identified above the line of interaction. These
activities may involve employees from different departments of
the organization, even those who are don’t directly interact
with customers.
Once the support functions are identified, link the contact
activities to them. This step will help you understand the direct
and indirect impact of internal actions on the customers.
Use the dynamic connectors to link activities. You can also
color code and customize the connectors.
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 Step 5: Add physical evidence of service at each
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customer action step

Finally, add the physical evidence to the map. This highlights
what the customer sees or receives as tangible evidence of the
service during each step of their experience.
Step 6: Fine-tune and share
In the final step of creating a service blueprint, you can add
additional elements such as time indicators, metrics, or
employee emotions to refine your diagram even further.
Then share it across the organization to communicate your take
on how the internal organizational processes work.
With Creately, you can simply do this by exporting your
diagrams in PDF, SVG, PNG, JPEG formats, which you can then
publish or embed in your internal wikis, websites or take
printouts.
You can also share it through Slack where anyone in the
channel can easily preview the blueprint without having to log
in to Creately first.
Or you can use the Creately Google Drive integration to create,
share, store and manage permissions to your service blueprints
right within the application.
If you rely on Confluence for project management, you may
also find the Creately Plugin for Confluence useful as it works
natively inside your on-premise Confluence server and lets you
add visuals and diagrams as attachments to your pages and
posts.
Service Blueprint Examples
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Restaurant Service Blueprint

Restaurant Service Blueprint
Restaurant Service Blueprint (Click on the template to edit it online)

Hospital Service Blueprint

Service Blueprint Hospital
Service Blueprint Hospital (Click on the template to edit it online)

Hotel Service Blueprint

Hotel Service Blueprint
Hotel Service Blueprint (Click on the template to edit it online)

Movie Theater Service Blueprint

Movie Theater Service Blueprint
Movie Theater Service Blueprint (Click on the template to edit it online)

Commonwealth Bank Service Blueprint

Commonwealth Bank Service Blueprint
Commonwealth Bank Service Blueprint (Click on the template to edit it online)

Finance Industy Service Blueprint

Finance Industy Service Blueprint
Finance Industy Service Blueprint (Click on the template to edit it online)

New Service Blueprint for a Coffee Shop

New Service Blueprint for a Coffee Shop
New Service Blueprint for a Coffee Shop (Click on the template to edit it online)
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Example Uber Service Blueprint

Uber Service Blueprint
Example Uber Service Blueprint (Click on the template to edit it online)

Ready to Create Your Own Service Blueprint?

As the name suggests, a service blueprint offers a blueprint of
your service process. It simplifies the task of mapping out
everything from each step of the process to the different roles
in it, making it easier to design a new service delivery system
or improve an existing one. This guide explains how to do this
in detail.
Got anything to add? Let us know in the comments section
below.

FAQs About Service Blueprints

How can service blueprints help identify and

improve customer touchpoints? 

How can service blueprints contribute to service

innovation and new service development?
Are there any limitations or challenges in using 
service blueprints?
How can organizations effectively implement and
maintain service blueprints?

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Are there any best practices or tips for creating 

impactful service blueprints?

service blueprint service blueprint examples

Author
Amanda
Athuraliya Amanda Athuraliya
Communications Specialist
Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content
writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool.
She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate
researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.
link
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View all posts by Amanda Athuraliya →

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