According to recent research (Hollins, Blackman and Shinkins, University of Westminster, 2002 onwards) only one in five service sector companies has a written process for developing services. This suggests many businesses are vulnerable because of a lack of effective management procedures. These problems are accentuated by the failure of 48 per cent of companies to do research before developing services.
By putting customer convenience and satisfaction at the forefront of total design, designers are forced to think of (and then design) the customer experience. Often this starts by blueprinting the likely customer experience then improving the proposed service through the elimination of 'blockages' to efficiency and satisfaction.
A Blueprint is defined as a ‘process broken down chronologically into sequential constituent stages’.
Blueprinting has only recently been developed as a method for designing services. But it is increasingly being used much more widely in the design of – and for improvement in – services.
The process involves describing, in small detail, the various stages of the delivery of a service. In other disciplines it is sometimes called a Project schedule, Project or Process Plan, or a Process Map.
In fact it’s unlikely that an effective service can be designed without the use of a blueprint which describes both customer activities and parallel activities. This will show all interactions by and with customers – in fact, it almost defines what a service is.
The blueprint can be compiled at any stage of the design process to help identify potential problems and benefits.
Blueprints should always be presented with a base of time: this is essential for determining parallel stages and concurrencies, total time, and therefore cost.
- Focus mainly on the 'touch points' at which the customer interfaces with the service providers. There will also be other parallel blueprints that will affect customer satisfaction.
- Enhance the blueprint by looking at the sensory side of the customer experience. At each stage of the experience what does the customer see, hear, smell, touch or taste? By improving each of these the customer experience is enhanced.
- Look at the process. Look at the customer chain and understand how customers relate to the process. This will identify bottlenecks and areas where the service quality may be improved. Then you can design the problems out of the process.
- Through blueprinting service quality, which tends to be mainly qualitative and therefore difficult to measure, can be made more quantitative by giving the service process the appearance of a production line.
- When doing a blueprint, do it then do it again. First put everything you think you need to know into logical boxes. Then subdivide these into twice as much detail and twice as many boxes. This system works better the more details that are described. It is important to remember two things:
- The entire process needs to be mapped
- It should be mapped in very small steps in order to identify problem areas, to which a cure can be identified.
In a service, match the length of time of one stage of the process with the next, so that as a customer finishes one stage they go straight on to the next without having to wait (called ‘line of balance). This promotes a much higher quality service.
Blueprints should always be presented with a base of time for determining the parallel stages, the concurrencies, the total time and therefore, cost.
A blueprint of the Exeter Wonford Hospital outpatients department helped the hospital improve the throughput and service in this department and had the added bonus of relieving congestion in its car park. Randall (1993) shows how a thorough blueprint of the customer journey, which encompassed everything they did on a trip to the outpatients department, eventually helped develop service improvements that saved Exeter Wonford Hospital more than £1million.
Mystery shoppers are now widely used in the service sector, in pubs, train operators and airlines for instance, to measure the quality of any service throughout the customer journey. Customer’s interaction with service providers are mapped as part of the blueprint to show up bottlenecks or areas for possible improvement.
For example, London Underground map the entire process that a customer takes from entering the station and purchasing a ticket, right through to having the ticket automatically collected and the passenger leaving the station. They have then identified areas where improvements are possible and have been able to develop good value responses.
Other studies have taken the idea further and identified that not all queues in the process have the same value. In Sweden it was found that people were more concerned about queuing to buy train tickets than they were about waiting on the platform for the train. This was because when you are waiting for a ticket you might miss the train but when you are waiting on the platform you won’t. This means that it is possible to rank by importance the various bottlenecks on the blueprint and those problems of higher order should be overcome first.
A good starting point with blueprinting is to ask a simple question and then, through the blueprint, try and find the answer. For example, why do you have to check in two hours early for a European flight? To answer this five blueprints will need to be produced. One will be for the actual passenger, one for their luggage, one for maintaining and refuelling the plane, one for cleaning and loading the food and one for changing crews and the flight checks.
Now, in practice, this blueprinting becomes difficult because a lot of these functions are undertaken by different organisations. But if only one blueprint is used the identified benefits may not be realised.
It is often not fully realised that design models can be linked with the use of service blueprints: the blueprint can almost be considered as a production process. (The linking of product and process design in manufactured products in Japan was one of the keys to improving quality and lowering costs which first enabled the country’s manufacturers to win world markets.) A service blueprint is really a demonstration of service process design.