This weeks lecture was extremely useful to me as it was about something I have not covered at all in my past studies.

A really nice example/visual of hows service blueprint looks is the famous ‘iceburg’ theory. For this example the ‘above water’ section is what customers see and below water is ‘what makes it work’

The visible experience of a service blueprint includes:

• The customer journey
• Touch points
• Front stage Interactions

The hidden operations include:

• The backstage process
• Support systems
• Infrastructure
• Dependencies

It was described that service blueprints are a zoomed out version of a blueprint ‘A Journey map is a blueprint on steroids’.

It was said without a service blueprint you can run into complex, expensive problems if you don't create service blueprints. For example users may love the concept but it still may not work. In the lecture there was some illustrated scenarios.

One of these scenarios was a GP Surgery which began using a online appointment booking system to cut phone traffic. Calls fell 60% and patients loved the 24/7 access. But this added more stress to the receptionists as each online booking still required manual checks. This new system shifted work from the front stage to backstage rather than removing it, leaving staff to process a invisible, unmanaged queue. Using a service blueprint would have revealed that the unchanged backstage workload.