Service Blueprints
The Basic Idea
Imagine you want to order a pizza for dinner, so you place an online order with your favorite spot. While you wait for the delivery, a staff member receives your order and springs into action, tossing fresh dough and preparing your pizza just the way you want. They hand off the box with your freshly baked pizza to a delivery driver who places it in an insulated bag and drives off in your direction. Other employees are busy wiping down kitchen surfaces, chopping vegetables, and mixing dough. Meanwhile, the manager sits in the back office ordering supplies and scheduling equipment maintenance.
These various elements work together like a well-oiled machine, ensuring your pizza arrives on time, steaming hot, and predictably delicious. The pizzeria operates at this level of efficiency and consistency because it operates following a service blueprint.
A service blueprint is a visualization of the various elements involved in delivering a service to a customer. It’s a map of the whole service process, including the people, actions, and objects that collaborate to support the customer journey and shape customer experiences at every touchpoint.2 These blueprints are widely used to design services and manage operations.
Mapping the service process makes it easier to understand how all the moving parts of a business come together to create customer experiences. This can help managers identify potential problems in their service processes, brainstorm ideas to improve efficiency, and understand how customers are impacted by what’s going on behind the scenes.
Consider this: a restaurant owner wants to expand their takeout and delivery business by adding in-house dining. What staff actions or backstage processes might need to change to accommodate this? Would the owner need to hire more workers or add another prep area to the kitchen? Without carefully considering the existing service process, adding dine-in services might create lengthy wait times and hurt the customer experience. A service blueprint can help the manager proactively address these challenges and incorporate changes as smoothly as possible.
A blueprint encourages creativity, preemptive problem solving, and controlled implementation. It can reduce the potential for failure and enhance management’s ability to think effectively about new services.
— G. Lynn Shostack, from Designing Services That Deliver2
About the Author
Kira Warje
Kira holds a degree in Psychology with an extended minor in Anthropology. Fascinated by all things human, she has written extensively on cognition and mental health, often leveraging insights about the human mind to craft actionable marketing content for brands. She loves talking about human quirks and motivations, driven by the belief that behavioural science can help us all lead healthier, happier, and more sustainable lives. Occasionally, Kira dabbles in web development and enjoys learning about the synergy between psychology and UX design.
