Service Blueprint
Outline a service's processes, touchpoints, and interactions from both the customer and organisational perspectives.
Author: Eero Hosiaisluoma @EeroHosi
Stage: This is a stub – if you would like to contribute and expand it please get in touch.
Phase: Focus | Explore | Co-Create | Invest | Realise | Sustain | All
Scope: Architecture | Identity | Experience | Enterprise
Flight level: Operations | Coordination | Strategy
Short description:
The Service Blueprint defines the customer journey, detailing the customer’s activities alongside the services, products, and activities of the enterprise. It enables the analysis of the entire stack, from the customer’s perspective to the organisational perspective. The Service Blueprint provides a holistic, human-centric, and collaborative view of a service, integrating both customer and organisational perspectives. A simple basic structure is shown below.
A Service Blueprint is a detailed visual map that outlines a service's processes, touchpoints, and interactions from both the customer and organisational perspectives. |
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Service Blueprint | ||
1 | Visual Map of | A visual representation that outlines the end-to-end process of a |
2 | Highlights Frontstage | It distinguishes between frontstage activities (direct customer |
3 | Enables Process | By identifying pain points, inefficiencies, and opportunities, a Service |
The Service Blueprint is one of the most comprehensive customer-driven visualisations. There are many variations of them. The main idea is to show what is the customer doing while trying to accomplish task(s), and how is he/she served by the enterprise. As such, a Service Blueprint combines a) customer experience in the form of the journey with b) the task(s) to be accomplished, c) the products and/or services, provided by the enterprise, and d) the back-office processes and e) supporting applications.
The Service Blueprint is based on a customer journey that is a 'timeline' of the customer
experiences. The customer journey of the Service Blueprint can be divided into periods as follows:
Pre-Service Period,
Service Period and
Post-Service Period.
This simple division into phases makes the overall Service Blueprint easier to understand and design. This helps understanding a) what are the customer actions and needs before the decision to get into the service, b) what are the main needs within the service, and c) what is important for the customer after the service.
A Service Blueprint is visualised as a layered structure, where the customer actions and needs are introduced on top layers, and organisation’s actions are introduced on the bottom layers. The service layer is visualised in between the customer and organisation activities.
Note! There is no typical or ‘standard’ Service Blueprint with commonly agreed terminology and visualisation. Instead, there are many variations of it, some of which are shown here. Service Blueprint examples below.
Using a service blueprint as a tool for service design and business architecture collaboration
offers several key advantages, as it bridges customer experiences with internal operations,
processes, and applications. It creates a shared understanding, highlights areas for
improvement, and ensures that services are both customer-centric and operationally effective. This fosters better collaboration, more informed decisions, and a stronger alignment between customer needs and business goals.
The service blueprint is an essential tool for bridging the gap between service design and business architecture. |
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Service Blueprints can be used to define customer activities in contrast to the company's
activities, and to map customer needs (tasks) against the products and/or services provided
by the company. Additionally, they make visible what happens behind the scenes of these
products and/or services: the back-end processes, the parts of the organisation involved, and
the supporting applications.
Capabilities can be used as higher-level back-stage elements. Whether to use process or
capability elements in the backstage depends on the level of abstraction, which in turn
depends on the context and what is appropriate for the purpose.
Benefits of using a Service Blueprint in co-design and collaboration with customers, service
designers, and business architects:
Benefits of a Service Blueprint | ||
1 | Shared | Provides a common visual framework that bridges the perspectives |
2 | Identification of | By visualising both frontstage (customer-facing) and backstage |
3 | Facilitates Effective | Serves as a communication tool that simplifies complex processes, |
Service Blueprint can be specified with 1) pre-service- , 2) service- and 3) post-service periods as shown below.