How to make a service blueprint
A service blueprint segments a service’s backstage processes, front stage touchpoints, and the user’s journey. The benefits of service blueprinting are vast – here are five steps to follow while creating a service blueprint:
1: Define your opportunities and scenarios
Before you start blueprinting, identify potential opportunities that are critical to your business’ success. These are your ‘opportunity spaces’ — high-level, simple, and broad parts of your service journey such as a new customer signing up to a service.
2: Choose your scenarios
Create scenarios around each opportunity space by considering specific pain points as identified by qualitative or quantitative research. List out your chosen scenarios and consider which of the identified scenarios will have the biggest impact on your business and service.
Invite key stakeholders to identify specific steps that happen behind-the-scenes of your chosen scenario. You can always include pictures, screenshots, sketches or illustrations for added detail.
3: Map your blueprint
Blueprinting helps to visualise different components of a scenario and adds depth to each use case. Starting from left to right, progress through each step of the blueprint by adding in detail to the layers. When each step has sufficient details, progress onto the next step and repeat the process for each of the scenarios.
Get your service blueprint template here.
4: Take notes!
Take a step back to observe your blueprint and record any noticeable patterns or overarching themes in your analysis. Begin to prioritise and validate each insight.
While service blueprinting is not the right stage to devise solutions, take notes of any ideas or solutions that arise along the way as these may come in handy at a later stage. Plus, by collecting ideas from your blueprints, you’ll generate more holistic insights for improvement within your opportunity space.
5: Share insights and take action
Experiences never occur in silos so, in the long term, it is beneficial to share actionable insights and learnings to create lasting change within your organisation.
As you begin to notice key themes and patterns in your service opportunities, determine the tactical fixes and strategic improvements that will generate the most business impact. Communicate these with the wider organisation to ensure everyone is aligned.