Service Design Blueprint
Overview
A Service Blueprint, is a map of the entire service offering. It takes a Customer Journey Map and overlays the inner workings of the service. This is used to discover the root cause of pain points, leading to funnel drop off.
Approach:
- Customer centric: Understanding customers through interviews, personas and a customer journey map.
- Co-creation: Working with customers, employees and stakeholders to improve their experiences within the service.
- Holistic: Building interdependent and interrelated experiences that connect to people.
Key outputs:
Customer Journey Map
A diagram that condenses customer interviews & metrics to determine where the joys and pain points of a service are.
Service Blueprint
This combines the Customer Journey Map with the inner workings* of the business (below). This is used to discover where the root cause of a pain point is; both for customers and employees.
* Business inner workings include:
- Frontstage activities which a customer interacts with (Emails, Alerts, UI, etc.)
- Backstage activities which a customer doesn’t interact with (Analytics, Stock management, Training, etc.).
Role:
Lead Service Designer / UX Researcher:
- User tester
- Lead interviewer
- Data analyst
- Blueprint Designer
- Ambassador (to promote its use)
Tools:
- Chattermill (Sentiment Analysis tool - Customer Feedback)
- Figma (Builder)
- Zoom (remote calls)
- GA (Analytics)
Business Problem
MPB had breached into new markets, launched their new platform and scaled. Chief Stakeholders in the global business wanted to determine what the core pain points were across their major markets and determine if there were market-dependent opportunities for improvement.
The Service Blueprint would set a baseline for the business, and would become something that would be updated every 6 months.
HMWs
How might we understand and map the performance of MPB’s service offering from a customer perspective across the major markets?
How might we discover the highest priority improvement opportunities?
Solution
View Blueprint
Here's a run through of how to use the Service Blueprint that Helen (PO) and I created to help make it more digestible and usable across the company.
A testament to one of my key values of wishing to break down silos and share valuable insights across departments.
Research Highlights
• Customer Interviews
• Platform-wide Usability testing
• 39 interviews with internal SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)
• 64,500 Customer feedback responses
• Analytics tools: Chattermill + GA + Fullstory + Google Sheets
• Opportunities workshop to explore core insights and priorities
Helen (an adept Product Owner) and I interviewed customers and MPB SMEs about the key service offering from acquisition to aftercare.
The question set was tailored to each SME to ensure we got the best insights in the most efficient timescale.
Blueprint Design
Key challenges:
- Thematic Analysis: Take swaths of raw insights and process it for patterns.
- Opportunities: Find key opportunities to address.
- Visual & Digestible: For each department across the company.
- Engaging: To drive the opportunities to be addressed.
- Updatable: This is not one and done. We want this to be a twice yearly effort, so it helps to get this right first time.
- Emotive: The insights we gather is not just numbers, but real stories. We wanted to keep this using iconography and tone of voice.
Design Solution:
Much of the Service Blueprint designs you will see elsewhere feel very different to the one I've built. I built this bespoke to MPB, bringing the customer thoughts to life, and utilising colour and iconography to help make the key learnings more digestible and emotive.
Build - Figma
It was built to be A0, so a very large printout.
Why Figma for print?
The Auto-layout feature allows this to be very dynamic. The version 2 of this could also be hooked up to a CMS via a plugin so that it can be updated without Figma skillsets.
It was printed and put into each market location in the MPB offices internationally, including:
Checkout the images below to see!
- Brighton, UK 🇬🇧
- Brooklyn, US 🇺🇸
- Berlin, DE 🇩🇪
Next steps - Blueprint Continuous Discovery
Async data collection of internal challenges
Overcoming V1 challenges:
Challenge 1: Admin of organising internal interviews.
Challenge 2: The right feedback at the right time: There were tons of useful insights, but only what SMEs could remember at a given time.
Challenge 3: Unsorted data: Thematically grouping data into customer journey was very time-consuming.
Solution:
A simple survey built in Typeform. Enabling internal staff to log feedback of internal challenges and recurrent customer complaints. The survey is organised along the customer journey, saving time with thematic grouping, later.
Some screenshots of the v1 survey can be seen below.
