The third session of the Service Design book club covered Chapters 5 and 6. These chapters cover techniques for describing services, which fed well into work we are doing this quarter to improve our customer experiences. Jenni and I took the opportunity to try the book’s technique of service blueprinting to create a holistic view of our customer’s experiences. If you have not read the book, I think you’ll find this technique useful as it’s easy to apply without full understanding of service design. And if you have read the book, you know the examples in the book are hard to read and/or not in English, so hopefully this shows a real-world example.
We spent a couple hours creating our service blueprint, using a whiteboard and big stickies to easily change our approach as this was our first time service blueprinting. We started by drawing several swimlanes on the board (where TBD are blank spaces):
| Physical Evidence | TBD | TBD |
| Customer Actions | TBD | TBD |
| Onstage | TBD | TBD |
| Backstage | TBD | TBD |
| Product/Systems | TBD | TBD |
We then created the backbone for our service in large stickies. A key point from the book is to set a boundary for the blueprint as it can easily get out of scope if you don’t constrain it. Our backbone had about a dozen stages, with the first couple looking like this:
| Physical Evidence | Signed Contract | Welcome Email |
| Customer Actions | TBD | TBD |
| Onstage | TBD | TBD |
| Backstage | TBD | TBD |
| Product/Systems | TBD | TBD |
We then gave detail to each stage to show what the customer, onstage, backstage, and product actions are. Many of our stages had blanks for some areas as there are not activities onstage or backstage.
| Physical Evidence | Signed Contract | Welcome Email |
| Customer Actions | Product/Service Selection | First Login |
| Onstage | Contract Negotiation | Welcome Text |
| Backstage | Legal/Finance | Account Provisioning |
| Product/Systems | Provisioning System | Email Automation |
We tracked our open questions and ideas for improvement along the way on different stickies. At the end we had one of our key service reps join us in the room to review what we created, which led to some great conversations and corrections to our understanding. Most notable were discussions around how certain product features aren’t used by our teams as we thought they were, and around how we could make the final contract termination stage better to help our customers stop using our products.
I think the experience was great with a new PM for a number of reasons:
- The blueprint creates a foundation for understanding our full customer experiences, not just the product interactions.
- Trying a new technique together gives a space to experiment and collaborate towards a shared success with a blueprint artifact.
- The stakeholder review at the end helped form a key relationship for Jenni.
- The blueprint creates shared understanding for Jenni and I which can be used between us as well as with the development team and stakeholders.
We are planning on sharing the blueprint with others as a scaffold for this quarter’s work and to further validate some of our improvement ideas. I think it was a successful activity and would recommend it, especially for product work that impacts a customer across multiple touch-points in their life cycle.
If you are interested in hosting your own Service Design book club, here are some discussion questions from these chapters:
- What did you think of Service Blueprinting? Should we set up a workshop to create one? From the book, where the importance of the mapping activity is highlighted: “First, it wasn’t the map itself, but the mapping.”
- A theatrical metaphor was used to describe frontstage/backstage service activities. Did this resonate with you? Why or why not? From the book “Shostack’s line of visibility has transmuted into the frontstage/ backstage metaphor in which anything that the “customer” experiences is frontstage (on-stage would be more appropriate to the metaphor) and everything else that goes on behind the scenes to make that happen is backstage.”
- Are there backstage activities that we could bring frontstage to improve our service experience? From the book “Often, this backstage activity is evidenced in some way by bringing it frontstage, such as the folded toilet paper tip in a hotel bathroom that indicates the room has been cleaned.”