The Anatomy of an Experience Blueprint

What is an Experience Blueprint?

It is a schematic diagram that represents all the details of a service from both the customer and organization’s perspective. It represents all the different layers of delivery capabilities required to successfully execute against the new client experience for a given process.

You can think of an Experience Blueprint as an “operational tool”. It helps you describe the nature and the characteristics of the service interaction in enough detail to verify, implement, and maintain it. It is literally the “blueprint” which all cross functional teams reference when determining their respective roles in delivering the desired customer experience for a targeted customer experience or sub-journey.

Experience Blueprints are flexible and powerful in that they depict a service or sub-journey at multiple layers of execution (OnStage and BackStage) and therefore can facilitate the refinement of an existing service experience as well as the creation of an entirely new service experience.

When and why are Experience Blueprints useful?

Experience Blueprints can be useful in any one of the following scenarios:

1. You want to assess, analyze, and/or improve an existing service offering in response to newly formed customer insights and/or a response to competitive product/service offering;

2. You want to breakup or extend an existing service into one or more service offerings (e.g., bronze, silver, gold) to enable the entrance into a new market or targeting a new customer segment;

3. You want to design a new, somewhat complex service in that it represents a mix of both digital and non-digital touchpoints;

4. You recognize that the new service you are looking to design has several players involved (e.g., sales, service, vendor parters, IT) who must all be alignment to successfully execute the customer experience vision.

One or more of the above drivers are reasons to take a more formal, co-creative approach to service experience design to ensure you achieve the targeted goals and objectives around your customer experience initiative.

The Anatomy of an Experience Blueprint:

An Experience Blueprint has several lines of demarcation (layers of definition):

a) The “Line of Interaction which separates the Actions of the Customer from the OnStage service activities performed by employees;

b) The “Line of Visibility” which separates the service activities that the customer can see (OnStage) from the service activities which are hidden from view (BackStage); and

c) The “Line of Internal Interaction” which separates activities that imply immediate relation to the customers actions from support activities (Supporting Processes and Systems).

The Experience Blueprint consists of the following key components:

• Physical Evidence – these are the props (e.g., products, signage, etc.) that are encountered along the customer’s journey

• Customer Actions – the individual steps, sequence of activities, which a customer performs or is guided to perform as part of the process;

• Onstage Actions – customer-facing interactions with employees and/or customer-facing technologies;

• Backstage Actions – interactions with behind the scenes employees which the customer doesn’t necessarily see, but, are critical to delivery of the customer experience;

• Supporting Processes and Systems – all critical supporting processes and systems (internal or external) required to enable the process; and

• KPIs/Metrics – critical metrics to be tracked in regards to measuring the overall performance of the process

Customer Journey Maps not an end unto themselves

So while the Customer Journey Map is an important step in the overall process of customer experience design it is not an end unto itself. Customer Journey Maps help establish necessary "context" around the specific performance gaps or customer pain points from an outside-in, customer perspective. However, they lack the necessary detail to help guide or direct you in how to operationally fill or address these identified performance gaps.

This is where Experience Blueprinting steps in as a CX Service Design discipline that builds off the work performed in putting together a customer journey map from an "outside" perspective and helps you connect the people, processes, and systems (from an inside-out perspective) required to make operation the desired customer experience.

Experience Blueprints facilitate quick and easy testing or validation of a service experience

In addition, an often overlooked benefit of putting together an Experience BluePrint is the ability to test service delivery assumptions on paper and identify potential fail points, thoroughly working thru issues or potential pitfalls of a given customer experience even prior to piloting or implementing them. They can serve almost as a dress rehearsal for the cross-functional teams involved in putting them together.

Want to learn more about how to utilize experience blueprints to operationalize a new and improved experience?