What is service blueprinting?

- When you think about blueprints, you probably picture architectural drawings for a house or office space and you're right. But they're more than just drawings. They're essentially a how-to guide for building. With service blueprinting the same principle applies. But instead of a house, you're building your customer's experience. A service blueprint is a tool that helps you deliver better customer service. It's essentially a map that shows how the customer interacts with your company and what's happening behind the scenes to facilitate that experience. So when I talk about customer service blueprinting I'm talking about that process where you're discovering exactly what's happening at your company and looking for ways to improve how the company operates. But why go through the trouble of mapping all aspects of your customer's experience and what your company is doing along the way? One reason you might develop a blueprint is to fix problems you've run into. The blueprint could help you find what caused the problem and then you'll be able to come up with a solution. Maybe you run a hospital, you've learned that there are many repeat patients in the emergency room because they're not following the doctor's advice after the first visit. A blueprint could help you figure out that the doctor simply tells patients what to do and that isn't enough. Written instructions would help patients more and prevent return visits. That's an easy fix, but it'd be tough to figure that out without seeing the blueprint. Another goal might be allocating resources. The blueprint helps companies see where business resources are going and then they can move those around to optimize the customer's experience. For example, if you own a boutique and have a rush every day between the hours of three and five, you probably need to have an extra employee on the floor during those hours, a blueprint helps you see exactly when those extra hands are needed. A third goal for service blueprinting could be to come up with a totally new way to deliver service. It can be an opportunity to set a new vision for the customer experience. Think about a company like FedEx. Their founder, Fred Smith, wrote a paper in college in 1965 about creating a shipping company focused on overnight delivery. Very few people, including his professor, believed that was possible. But Fred thought through all the operations and processes to make it a reality. Service blueprints can help you with this type of thinking. As you can probably tell, service blueprints help you move beyond talking about exceptional customer experiences and actually making them happen. To see a good example, download the restaurant service blueprint in your exercise files now. This will help you get a feel for what we're creating throughout the blueprinting process. Are you ready to become the service architect your customers need you to be?