BLUEPRINTING

Application: Service Design

The Concept

Services, unlike products, contain a process through which a customer must move and that process should be designed or “blueprinted”. Process is central to the success of the service and the nature of the experience that the customers receive. When people use a service they must submit themselves to the service provider’s process. So, one of the major differences between the purchase of a product and the experience of a service is the process through which the buyer moves (see services marketing).

Marketers must plan the service process in detail and educate their customers in the parts of the service they will experience. Potential customers must know how to access the supplier’s service system, which has to be designed to encourage use. The firm needs to use clear signage and communicate its meaning to all potential buyers. Educating them to access and use the supplier’s process is, therefore, an important aspect of services marketing. This ranges from the deployment of branded consumer signage, like McDonald’s, to the use of customized web sites as extranets for customers in business-to-business markets.

Once “in the premises”, though, the buyer needs direction (even in a virtual environment). If it is not immediately apparent how to use the system (the equivalent of standing helplessly in a foreign shop) the buyer becomes embarrassed and gives up. So, clear signage into the delivery process and a step-by-step guide through it are equally important. On landing, for example, many flights show a video guide through the airport. This ensures that the stress levels of new passengers stay low and any difficulties are seen as aberrations, which can be corrected by excellent service recovery. Finally, marketing communication must concentrate on the “outcomes” of the process rather than the “benefits” emphasized by product marketers.

Service blueprinting needs:

• to identify all the main functions of the service
• to show time dimensions in diagrammatic form
• to precisely define tolerances (i.e. the degree of variation from standards).

A blueprint should be constructed in the following way:

History, Context, Criticism, and Development

The proactive creation of a service through the use of process design techniques has been suggested by several specialists. Lyn Shostack, a practising marketer (a VP of Citibank) rather than an academic, seems to have been the first. She pointed out (Shostack, G.L., 1982) that, whereas it is relatively easy to design a product through engineering specification, there was no “service engineering” technique to which service designers could turn. Services are therefore often launched before they are ready for customers to use. She suggested that, as a service is a process, it can be “blue printed” by using the “Organisation & Methods” (O&M) techniques (a pseudo-scientific process design technique of, largely, the 1960s now superseded) developed to deal with process improvement.

These she suggested, included:

• Time and motion engineering. Shostack suggested that of eight basic charts used by methods engineers, those which were most applicable were the “operations process chart”, a “flow process chart”, and the “flow diagram”.
• “PERT” charting. This is an accepted method of planning detailed projects.
• Systems and software design. It was suggested that many of the software design methodologies could be used to design service processes.

Shostack used a “blueprint for a simple shoeshine service”, which is shown in Figure B.2, to illustrate the work she had pioneered at her bank. She originally offered the concept of blueprinting alongside molecular modelling and suggested that academics develop and test both for more generic use by business. Later writers on the subject have neglected the latter but developed the use of blueprinting in service design. This may be because the popularity of “O&M” waned somewhat in the 1980s although the concept of process mapping has received attention because of emphasis in senior management circles on the concept of “process re-engineering” (see thought leadership).

Figure B.2: Lyn Shostack’s representation of a simple service blueprint

(from Shostack, G.L., 1982)

Yet the process that clients experience is important to both the delivery of good service and to the experience of the customer. It can create opportunities for new services and for new market strategies. Blueprinting is a practical and straightforward method to use in designing these aspects of a service. It is taught in specialist centres (like the Service Management Centre at the University of Arizona) and used throughout the service sector today. It (or a version of it) has also been used to improve generic service and aftercare. In financial services, for instance, marketers have been prompting executives to map the “customer journey” for several years. This charts the progress of customers through their operational processes and distinguishes between “front office” and “back office” in a similar way to Shostack’s blueprinting. Moreover, CEM (see service quality) techniques also prompt executives to think through the customers’ experience of the service process.

Voices and Further Reading

• “Services are very often defined in terms of poorly articulated oral and written abstractions. From this subjective and superficial start, the conclusion is drawn that ‘the service’ is now documented and understood, that what is ‘known’ about the service can be communicated with precision and certainty … perhaps this is why so many services go awry … What is required is a system which will allow the structure of a service to be mapped in an objective and explicit manner while also capturing all the essential functions to which marketing applies; in other words, a service blueprint.” Shostack, 1982.
• Shostack, G.L., “How to design a service”. European Journal of Marketing, 1982.
• “Services are processes consisting of activities or a series of activities rather than things. In order to understand service management and the marketing of services it is critical that one realizes that the consumption of a service is process consumption rather than outcome consumption. The consumer perceives the service process (or production process) as part of the service consumption, not simply the outcome of that process, as in traditional marketing of physical goods … the consumption process leads to an outcome for the customer, which is the result of the service process. Thus, the consumption of the service process is a critical part of the service experience.” Grönroos, C., 2003.
• Ziethaml, V. and Bitner, M.J., Services Marketing. Irwin McGraw-Hill, 2003.