Que- What is Service Blueprinting? Explain the process of Service blue printing with an example.

Answer

A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different

service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes
— that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to

customer-journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning
many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences
that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or require a crossfunctional
effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).

A service blueprint corresponds to a specific customer journey and the specific

user goals associated to that journey. This journey can vary in scope. Thus, for the
same service, you may have multiple blueprints if there are several different
scenarios that it can accommodate. For example, with a restaurant business, you
may have separate service blueprints for the tasks of ordering food for takeout
versus dining in the restaurant.

Service blueprints should always align to a business goal: reducing redundancies,

improving the employee experience, or converging siloed processes.

Process of service blue print:-

1. Find support

Level-set and educate on service blueprinting. First, pull together a

crossdisciplinary team that has responsibility for a portion of the service and
establish stakeholder support for the blueprinting initiative. Support can come from
a manager, executives, or clients.

2. Define the goal

Choose a scope and focus. Identify one scenario (your scope) and its corresponding
customer. Decide how granular the blueprint will be, as well as which direct
business goal it will address. While an as-is blueprint gives insight into an existing
service, a to-be blueprint gives you the opportunity to explore future services that
do not currently exist.

3. Gather research

Unlike customer-journey mapping where a lot of external research is required,

service blueprinting is comprised of primarily internal research.

A. Gather customer research.

Begin by gathering research that informs a baseline of customer actions (or,

in other words, the steps and interactions that customers perform while
interacting with a service to reach a particular goal). Customer actions can be
derived from an existing customer-journey map.

B. Gather internal research.

Choose a minimum of two research methods that put you in direct line of
observation with employees. Use a multipronged approach — select and
combine multiple methods in order to reveal insights from different angles
and job roles:

 Employee interviews
  Direct observation
 Contextual inquiry
 Diary studies

4. Map the blueprint

A. Set up

It’s useful to organize a short workshop session (2–4 hours) to do steps 4 and

5. This helps create a shared understanding amongst your team of allies and
ensures that the blueprint remains collaborative and unbiased.

If all workshop participants are in the same physical location, set up by

hanging three oversized sticky notes on the wall side by side. Each member
should have a pad of post-its. The result of the workshop will be a low-
fidelity version of an initial blueprint. If workshop participants are spread
across a variety of locations, turn the workshop digital by using a white-
boarding tool like Mural.co.

While any mapping method is collaborative at its core, blueprinting can still
be done individually. If this is the case, be sure to share your blueprint with
stakeholders and peers early and often.

B. Map customer actions.

In a service blueprint, customer actions are depicted in sequence, from start to

finish. A customer-journey map is an ideal starting point for this step. Do
note that a blueprint’s focus is the employee experience, not the customer’s
experience, thus this portion does not need to be a fully baked customer-
 journey map — rather, you can include only the user touchpoints and parallel
actions.

C. Map employees’ frontstage and backstage actions.

This step is the core of a service-blueprint mapping. It is easiest to start with

frontstage actions and move downward in columns, following them with
backstage actions. Inputs should be pulled from real employee accounts, and
validated through internal research. (Remember the old lesson from field
research: how things are supposed to be done is rarely how they’re done. You
need to discover and document the latter.)

D. Map support processes and evidence.

Add the process that employees rely on to effectively interact with the
customer. These processes are the activities involving all employees within
the company, including those who don’t typically interact directly with
customers. These support processes need to happen in order to deliver the
service. Clearly, service quality is often impacted by these below-the-line
interaction activities.

Layer in the evidence at each customer’s action step. Work your way through
the first 5 steps and ask “what props and places are encountered along the
way?” Remember to include evidence that occurs frontstage and backstage.

5. Refine and distribute

Refine by adding any other contextual details as needed. These details include
time, arrows, metrics, and regulations (refer to Service Blueprints: Definition for a
full list).
The blueprint itself is simply a tool that will help you communicate your
understanding of the internal organization processes in an engaging way. At this
point, you need to create a visual narrative that will convey the journey and its
critical moments, pain points, and redundancies.

A good way to implement this step is to have another workshop with your core
team. Having built context and common ground throughout your mapping process,
bring them back together and evolve the blueprint into a high-fidelity format.

. Que-Define Servicescape. Discuss various elements of Physical evidence with the help of an

example

Answer

Servicescape is a model developed by Booms and Bitner[1] to emphasize the impact of the physical
environment in which a service process takes place. The aim of the servicescapes model is to explain behavior
of people within the service environment with a view to designing environments that does not accomplish
organisational goals in terms of achieving desired behavioural responses. For consumers visiting a service or
retail store, the service environment is the first aspect of the service that is perceived by the customer and it is
at this stage that consumers are likely to form impressions of the level of service they will receive

Elements of physical evidence

Example of physical evidence