How to Use a Service Blueprint to Optimize Your Customer Journey

Author: Stephanie Caravajal

You’ve mapped your desired customer journey — now what?

Converting a journey map from paper to an actualized customer experience takes planning and a commitment to customer centricity. Utilizing a Service Blueprinting framework enables companies to connect on the end goal, the desired customer experience, and determine what is needed from all the different departments to realize the new vision.

Service blueprints, often referred to just as blueprints, are the counterparts to the customer journey map. They allow us to take a closer look into each customer action, providing a holistic view into how an experience will be implemented within the company and used by customers.

Who is Needed to Complete a Blueprint?

When blueprinting, it is of utmost importance to have the appropriate areas of the company involved to provide cross-functional communication and strategizing. Throughout the different stages of the blueprint process, various departments will need to be involved, such as technology, product management, operational teams, marketing, and CX. Having cross-functional buy-in from the outset will be key to its success.

Sections to a Service Blueprint

There are five sections of a typical service blueprint:

1. Customer Actions
2. Frontstage Interactions (visible company actions)
3. Backstage Interactions (invisible company actions)
4. Support Processes
5. Evidence

To begin the blueprint, we focus the work around the customer actions determined within the customer journey map (see: Harnessing a Journey Map to Empower Your CX Strategy). By laying out the customer actions first, we ensure all internal company activities are identified to support the value proposition for the customer.

Next, we identify what is needed from the company to support these actions. Frontstage interactions detail those actions the company does that the customer has visibility to, which can be human-to-human or human-to-technology (i.e., your customer visits your mobile app and needs assistance, there is an interaction via chatbot that the customer sees directly).

Beyond visible interactions, the next layer details what needs to occur backstage to support the customer action. To carry forward the mobile app example, the chat technology generates a response to the customer. Regardless of whether this is a programmed or live agent response, the technology behind this action is not visible to the customer, therefore making it a backstage interaction.

We then determine the support processes, which are all the activities carried out by areas that do not directly support interactions with customers. Some examples of what processes could fit into this stage are analytics, customer information logs, credit card processing, pricing, and delivery processes.

Lastly, we document the evidence, or tangibles, the customer is exposed to during each interaction (i.e., physical stores, emails, websites, etc.).

The Immense Value of Blueprints

Much like journey maps, a service blueprint is adaptable and designed to flex to fit your business goals. In our experience, blueprints consistently prove their value by driving cross-functional collaboration and supporting a customer-centric focus. This tool helps clearly depict needs and dependencies between customer-facing processes and those processes behind the scenes. It provides a mechanism for cross-functional departments to find reasonable solutions to support the desired customer experience.

Whether just getting started on your journey mapping efforts or looking for guidance on how to implement your journey maps through service blueprints, reach out to RevGen to schedule a chat with one of our CX experts.

Stephanie Caravajal is a manager at RevGen Partners specializing in customer experience. She is passionate about helping organizations create and manage successful CX programs while aligning CX initiatives to digital transformations.