Service Blueprint vs Journey Map: What’s the difference?

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are two of the most frequently used and compared design research tools. Both are valuable communication tools that show the end-to-end processes and experiences of your staff and/or customers. BUT, what’s the difference between a service blueprint and a journey map, and how do you know which is right for your project?

Whenever we meet with a new client or read a project brief, we’re faced with some of the same questions. Today, we’re breaking it down for you and answering these tricky questions:

What is a customer journey map?
What is a service blueprint?
What is a service design map?
Customer journey map vs service blueprint: When to use each?

What is a service blueprint?

A service blueprint is a business process mapping tool used in service design! It depicts a business’s processes that occur within the front-stage (customer-facing), backstage (internal) and behind the scenes. Specifically, it illustrates how an organization supports the customer journey, keeping customers, staff, and other key players in their operations.

Service blueprints are approached from a human-centered lens. Similar to customer journey maps, service blueprints should be created through research, with the actors (in this case, staff) involved. This might mean shadowing employees as they interact with customers and go about their day-to-day work or conducting several interviews over a few days or weeks with employees. By doing this, we can understand what the back-end processes are and where your employees think things are going wrong/could be improved.

As far as mapping tools go, service blueprints tend to be specific — they zoom in on a single business process rather than an end-to-end journey with an entire service. (The latter would be super complex to look at! Think of the squares in the diagram below multiplied by 20–30!)

Why are service blueprints useful?

Service blueprints are an amazing tool to outline the inner workings of your business. They look at all of the activities (good, bad, and useless) that your employees are doing and highlight the reasons why parts of the customer experience are failing.

In particular, service blueprints help to:

Pinpoint weaknesses in the current business processes
Find opportunities to optimize business and support processes (With a detailed breakdown of all the steps involved)
Tie the customer journey together with the inner workings of the company
Understand complications and inefficiencies within your organization

The 6 Core Elements of a Service Blueprint

A service blueprint is made up of these six components:

The customer journey
Pain points
Time
Front-stage
Back-stage
Behind-the-scenes

Each of these elements represent different types of information surrounding a business process as well as employees’ and customers’ interactions with it. We’ll break each one down below.

The Customer Journey

Your service blueprint will include the actions/steps taken by customers. This can help stakeholders, researchers and designers understand where they might be getting stuck, frustrated, detoured or disinterested in order to plan design solutions.

Pain Points

You’ll also include issues or challenges that staff (not just customers) might experience when completing certain tasks. These challenges can slow down customer service or operational/cost efficiency. After all, the purpose of examining the current state of a service is usually to design a service improvement!

Time

Make sure to include the length of time it takes to complete certain tasks or a series of tasks, since this could be a signal for areas that are working and areas to improve.

Front-Stage

With “front-stage” and “back-stage,” we’re referring to the theater/performance analogy that’s often used in service design. The front-stage includes everything the customer sees and experiences.

In your service blueprint, add in and categorize the front-stage actions, i.e., the activities conducted by the people involved directly with your customers. (In a theatre, they would be the play actors, ticket salespeople, snack kiosk workers, ushers, etc.!) You should also detail the technology they’re using to take these actions.

Back-Stage

For your back-stage categorization, include the actions taken by employees who:

Help front-stage staff outside of customer view
Complete other customer-serving actions outside of customer’s view

Backstage actors are often made up of customer support representatives, warehouse workers, managers, etc. Going back to the analogy of a play, back-stage activities can include lighting, sound, rehearsal, costumes, and people getting ready to go on stage. Without these activities, the show would not go on, and there wouldn’t be a great experience for the audience.

Behind-the-Scenes

The last key elements for your service blueprinting are behind-the-scenes actions. These are actions taken by employees who support the business internally and aren’t directly involved in the day-to-day customer experience.

These actions ensure that the “show” goes off without a hitch. They include all of the support processes, administrative and project management work, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and organizational tasks that need to happen to ensure an organization is running smoothly.

What is a service design map?

A service design map is any service design deliverable that’s created using some form of mapping as part of the research or design process. Service design mapping can include service blueprinting, storyboarding, ecosystem mapping, user story mapping, etc. (See this post, which includes a list of mapping tools for design!)

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s dive into journey maps and a comparison between service blueprints vs. journey maps.

(Note: Want to read about all of this offline? Hoping to share some reading materials with a stakeholder or colleague? Send them our downloadable Guide to Customer Journey Maps vs Service Blueprints.)

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience your customers have when they interact with your product or service. It’s also created from the perspective of your customer. Usually, you’d use a customer journey map to explore how they accomplish a goal through something you offer. (Example: You might examine how users try to renew their driver’s licenses.)

You may have also heard of user journey maps, which are essentially the same idea, except that the focus would be on a user journey. (The key difference to read here is that not all end-users are necessarily customers. For example, you might be researching a free or publicly subsidized product.) Either way, we always recommend that journey maps are created using in-depth research (like in-depth interviews and observations) with your company’s real customers or users.

The core elements of a customer journey map will include:

The tasks and activities a user or customer goes through to accomplish a goal
Their pain points and challenges
The brand touchpoints they encounter (E.g. your website, an app, a customer support person, etc.).
The thoughts and feelings they experience as they go along their journey

All of these elements together on the map will tell a story of what a customer’s experience was, and all of the steps and missteps they took along the way.

Why are customer journey maps useful?

Customer journey maps are useful for finding key areas in the customer’s journey that provide a poor experience and highlighting opportunities to improve your product or service. Building customer journey maps can also show major inefficiencies in the customer experience.

Take, for example, someone who is trying to use an online system to remedy a billing issue and update their payment information. If, for some reason, the online service doesn’t work or provide the information they need, your customer resorts to calling the support team. Here, they wait on hold before having to explain themselves to a few different people and their goal of fixing their credit card information is accomplished. As you can imagine (OR you might not need to imagine!), this is a bad experience. By outlining this arduous journey, we can discover key areas for improvement and process streamlining.

The key uses for customer journey mapping are:

Identifying areas for improvement and places to reduce friction (Ultimately making things easier for the customer)
Identifying new product, service, or feature opportunities (These can help you stand out from the competition)
Prioritizing which areas of the experience should be fixed first (Journey maps are great at showing the relative importance of one issue over another since they’re all in one map together)
Bridging the gap between siloed teams (Not every department is focused on customer experience, but surely the customer’s experience throughout different parts of the journey will impact your organization’s various departments, such as marketing, IT, and customer service)
Building empathy for your customers by stepping into their shoes (You’ll find out what their experience is really like, what’s motivating them, and most importantly, what’s bugging them, so you can fix it and design a better experience)

Key Differences Between Journey Maps and Service Blueprints

Journey maps and service blueprints differ as far as the actors involved: In service blueprints, the actors include anyone involved in customer interactions or processes that impact the customer’s experience. The actors in customer journey mapping are the customers or end-users themselves.

Let’s take a look at a full list of distinctions below:

Journey maps (whether they’re customer or user journey maps) help to:

Depict an end-to-end experience as a narrative
Focus on customers/users
Understand a customer/user’s experience, thoughts and feelings, and pain points when trying to accomplish their goal
Study the customer actions and some front-stage actions (Tasks, tools, and touchpoints)

Service blueprints (a form of service design mapping) help to:

Depict the business processes and operations
Focus on customers, staff, and any other actors involved
Understand how the organization supports the customer/user experience (What activities, tasks, and physical evidence are needed)
Study the front-stage, back-stage, and behind-the-scenes actions (Using the customer journey as a foundation)

Ultimately, these tools are complementary to one another: Journey maps can help you understand where to focus and which business areas may need further investigation using a service blueprint. Service blueprints will break down all of the processes involved in making that experience a reality. (With widespread digitization, the distinction between products and services is basically null these days.)

In other words, the customer journey map provides the step-by-step tasks that form the foundation for a service blueprint. The activities completed by customers can actually make up the first row of tasks in a service blueprint.

When to Use Each Tool

Start with a journey map when:

You want a broader understanding of your end-to-end customer experience
You need to learn about how your customer is experiencing your offerings (Including services, products, user interfaces, customer support, online touchpoints)
You don’t have a lot of clarity about where things are going wrong or why your customers are unhappy

Then, once you have a deeper understanding of the areas which need improvement, you can launch a service blueprinting activity to find out what is happening behind-the-scenes in the company. (You can also check out our other post all about making journey maps actionable!)

Create a service blueprint when:

You feel confident in your understanding of the customer’s all-encompassing experience, but need to alleviate friction with a specific pain point
You want to take a more detailed look into a specific process and find efficiencies

We hope you enjoyed this blog post, and that it helped you get a clearer picture of these two important design research deliverables! Check out the resources below for further recommended reading/tools.

Resources we like…

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Service Blueprint vs Customer Journey Map: Design Tools Explained