011 min
A resort problem that needed a service blueprint
Fewer guests were coming back to the places run by ARAMARK Parks and Resorts, a company that operates services inside national parks and recreation areas. The drop was sharpest at Lake Powell in Arizona, where the company ran houseboat rentals, a resort, campgrounds, boat tours and food service. Renee Ryan, then its marketing director, wanted to know why.
Research named the problem. Many guests did not return because their first visit did not match what they expected from other resorts. The next question was what to change, and that is hard to answer when one visit passes through many teams.
A sales report cannot answer it, because a guest's visit crosses the resort, the boat rental, the shops and the staff behind each. No single manager sees all of it. Ryan used a method that draws the whole visit on one page, with the work of every team in it. That method is the service blueprint.
022 min
Where service blueprints come from
The method comes from banking. G. Lynn Shostack, a bank executive, first described it in the Harvard Business Review in 1984, in an article called "Designing Services That Deliver".
Her problem was that a service has no physical form to inspect, so customers and managers have few physical cues for judging its quality. People describe one in words, and words alone tend to give a version that is too simple and leaves steps out, as Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan later wrote. Shostack's answer was to chart a service the way an engineer charts a factory line.
Her original chart ran time along one axis and the steps of the process along the other. A line of visibility divided the steps a customer can see from the steps out of sight. She also marked how much freedom an employee has to vary each step. Shostack meant the chart as a planning tool. Managers could ask what-if questions on paper, for example what happens if staff get more freedom, without disturbing the real operation.
Later writers changed it. Bitner and colleagues describe how it began as a process control tool, then was redrawn to set the customer's process against the organisation's structure, then separated onstage from backstage work, and later added physical evidence. In 2006, Zeithaml, Bitner and Gremler recommended marking fail points and bottlenecks as well. Zeithaml and Bitner also suggest a line of implementation, which separates the managers who plan and control the service from the staff who prepare and support it.
Why tools for products do not fit services
Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan explain why a new technique was needed. A service is made in real time by customers, employees and technology together, and it has few fixed physical parts. Many tools for designing physical goods or software therefore work poorly for it, or need heavy adaptation.
032 min
How a service blueprint is laid out
Take the blueprint for a one-night hotel stay that Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan draw in their 2008 paper. It has five rows, and it reads from the top down. Each row is a lane for one kind of actor, so the page looks like a swim-lane diagram.
The customer row comes first. It lists what the guest does, in time order: make a reservation, arrive, hand the bags to a bellperson, check in, go to the room, order room service, sleep, check out. The authors say to draw this row before any other, because every other row is there to support these steps.
Above it, a row of physical evidence lists what the guest can see and touch, such as the website, the lobby, the room key and the staff uniforms. These things shape how good the guest thinks the service is.
Below the customer row, three more rows hold the work of the organisation. The words onstage and backstage come from the theatre. Here they mean only what the customer can and cannot see. Three lines separate the rows.
- Line of interaction. Below it are the onstage actions, the staff work the guest sees directly. At the hotel, the front desk employee greets the guest and processes the registration.
- Line of visibility. The guest sees everything above this line and nothing below it. Below it are the backstage actions, staff work out of the guest's sight, such as taking bags up to the room.
- Line of internal interaction. Below it are the support processes: work done by people and systems that never meet the guest but are needed for the service to run. At the hotel these are the reservation system and the registration system.
Now follow one guest through check-in. The guest hands the bags to a bellperson, who greets them and takes the bags. That step is onstage. Then the bellperson carries the bags to the room, out of the guest's sight. That step is backstage. One employee works on both sides of the line, and the blueprint shows which half the guest sees.
Moments of truth
Each time the guest crosses the line of interaction, by meeting a staff member or by using self-service technology, a moment of truth occurs. The term names the instants when a customer judges the quality of the service and makes choices about future purchases.
One blueprint per kind of customer
A blueprint covers one customer segment and one scenario. An airline checks in a frequent flyer differently from other passengers, so each needs its own page. A restaurant may need separate pages for takeout and for eating in.
042 min
How to read a service blueprint for trouble
A finished blueprint is useful only when someone reads it for trouble. Three marks help.
A fail point is a step where something could go wrong and lower the customer's satisfaction. A bottleneck is a step where customers are likely to wait longer than they will accept. Both are marked on the blueprint, often beside the time each step takes. Handoffs between teams and waits are the first places to look.
The third mark is freedom. Two measures help when reading one. Complexity is the number of steps in the process. Divergence is how much room staff have to vary a step to suit the customer. A self-service cafeteria keeps divergence low, because guests choose from dishes prepared in advance. On a blueprint, managers can raise or lower either measure and see what changes.
Then follow the lines downward. When customers complain about a step, trace it through the line of visibility to the backstage work and the support system under it. Poor experiences often come from a failure inside the organisation rather than from the screen or desk the customer is looking at, such as corrupted data or long waits. A delay at the front desk may come from a check that happens out of sight, such as a compliance review. Following the lines is root cause analysis done on one diagram.
The view across the whole page matters for a second reason. Each department is usually judged on the touchpoint it owns, a touchpoint being any point where the customer meets the service. A department can reach its target while the customer's whole journey still fails, and only a view of the whole journey shows it.
Customers judge the whole sequence
Some research cited by Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan suggests that customers judge the sum of all the steps in a service, not each interaction alone. Other studies examine single events, each judged on its own qualities. A blueprint lets a team look at both: each step, and the whole run.
Disagreement in the room is data
People from different departments often describe the same step differently. Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan advise writing these disagreements down, because they usually point to a part of the service that does not work as people believe. They also warn against letting a disagreement stop the session.
052 min
What the Lake Powell blueprint showed
Back at Lake Powell, Ryan drew two blueprints. The first showed a stay at a good hotel or resort, seen from a typical guest's side. The second showed a stay at Lake Powell. Side by side, they differed in basic services, standards and processes.
Photos and video make the gaps visible
Ryan's blueprints included photos and video of the service. Bitner and colleagues say that seeing every step this way made the need for upgrades clear.
What the customer row revealed
The customer row showed something unexpected. Guests had bought an expensive, comfortable houseboat holiday. To get it, they first had to write long grocery lists, shop in busy stores close to the resort, and carry the food and their belongings down a steep embankment to the boat. On the water they anchored the boat each night, cooked on board and navigated, which was stressful for beginners. Together with run-down facilities on land, this work caused guests to stop coming after one trip.
The company changed the service. It added concierge services, starting with staff who took guests' belongings to the boat and later took guests to the boat dock in a cart. Higher packages included buying the groceries and an executive chef who travelled with the party and cooked on board. Guests could also hire a trained captain. The company renovated facilities, trained staff to new standards and introduced new measures and rewards.
Complaints at Lake Powell fell by 50 percent and repeat business rose by 12 percent. Bitner and colleagues credit these results to the whole set of improvements, not to the blueprint alone.
Compare the service as it is with the service as it should be
Ryan drew the service as guests normally got it and set it beside a blueprint of the experience they expected. Bitner and colleagues recommend this for any team. Map what typically happens first, then compare it with an ideal version or with a competitor's.
062 min
Three more service blueprints that changed a plan
Lake Powell used a blueprint to find what to fix. The same 2008 paper reports three other companies that used one differently.
Yellow Transportation: a new service
Yellow Transportation is a trucking company. In 1997 it offered no delivery guarantee, and one of its executives said its own research found that shipments were picked up late, damaged, lost, delivered wrongly or billed wrongly half the time. The team drew an ideal guaranteed express service from the customer's side and compared it with Yellow's own service and its competitors'. The blueprints showed that customers needed several ways to reach the company and that only a few touchpoints mattered to them. The result was Exact Express, which guarantees delivery within a stated time window. By the time of the paper, it was the company's most profitable service.
Yellow Transportation: the drivers
A blueprint of Yellow's core ground service showed that its truck drivers were the staff customers dealt with directly. Every meeting was a chance to build loyalty, so Yellow changed driver technology, training and uniforms.
Yellow Transportation: a workshop on missed pick-ups
Yellow also trained executives and managers to blueprint, in groups of fifty to sixty. One group took missed pick-ups, a recurring problem for delivery companies. Small teams blueprinted either how to avoid a missed pick-up or how to recover after one. Within two weeks, a senior executive had their recommendations.
IBM: a four-year innovation
Sara Moulton Reger of IBM Service Research studied an innovation called Tangible Culture, which took four years. She tried two kinds of analysis, and the blueprint proved more useful, because it showed the order of tasks over time, the backstage and support work, and the tasks that repeated. It also showed that creating the innovation was a small part of the process. Most of the effort went into putting it to use and getting people to adopt it.
San Francisco Giants: separate departments
Rick Mears, who ran guest services for the baseball team, drew a blueprint of customer contact with the heads of ticket services and consumer marketing. It showed where their three departments could combine or simplify their work. One change was that press releases, advertising, ballpark announcements and email were shared across departments and discussed before they went out.
071 min
Service blueprint vs journey map
Anyone who knows journey mapping will recognise the top of a blueprint, because the customer row is a journey map. NN/g treats the blueprint as a second part to the journey map. The map follows one person toward a goal, and the blueprint adds the work beneath each step. Both are built for one persona and one scenario.
| Journey map | Service blueprint | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | What is the experience? | What delivers the experience? |
| Viewpoint | The customer's | The customer's, plus the organisation's |
| What it shows | Actions, thoughts, feelings, pain points | Onstage and backstage actions, support processes, physical evidence |
| Usual owner | Customer experience, UX and product teams | Service design, operations and cross-functional teams |
| Reach for it when | You need to understand the customer | You need to fix how the experience is delivered |
A blueprint is not a detailed journey map
Joe Allen of Smaply argues that the difference is scope, not level of detail. A blueprint adds whole layers, the organisation itself, that a journey map never held. Putting internal systems into a journey map makes it hard to read and moves the focus away from the customer.
081 min
What else teams use a service blueprint for
Beyond repairs and new services, teams use blueprints in a few other ways.
A blueprint works as training material. Staff who see the whole page learn how their step fits the steps around it. It can also expose duplicated work. NN/g gives the example of information a company collects early in a journey, which staff could reuse later so that nobody asks the same question twice.
NN/g also recommends blueprints for services that run across several channels, such as a website, a store and a phone line, because one page can hold all of them. A blueprint describes a service whose steps are already known, so it suits analysis better than brainstorming.
It sits beside other process methods. Some teams combine it with Lean and Six Sigma, two methods for removing waste and variation from a process. A rough sketch on paper or a whiteboard is a fine way to start, and drawing software can come later.
092 min
When a service blueprint does not fit
A blueprint suits a service with many steps, several teams and a customer who meets only some of them. It fits less well in four situations.
Services with no staff in view
An online or kiosk service may have no employee in front of the customer. Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan suggest replacing the onstage employee row with an onstage technology row that shows how customers use the company's technology. An airline needs both rows, because customers check in at a kiosk and also speak to staff.
Clinics where almost everything is onstage
Marie Stopes International gives reproductive health information in 38 countries. In its clinics in developing countries almost all of the service happens in front of the patient, so a consultant, Mark Rosenbaum, changed the blueprint. For each moment of truth, the team listed the contact point, the physical evidence needed, the standards used to measure quality, and a script for what staff say. They then listed what each moment depended on: communication between staff, outside labs, technology and supplies.
Detail that does not fit one page
A support step that needs more detail can get its own sub-process diagram, drawn with whatever tool suits that process. The main blueprint stays short enough to read.
Blueprinting everything
Teams sometimes blueprint a whole journey from start to finish. Smaply warns that this produces a large diagram that nobody keeps up to date. It advises blueprinting only the moments where a real operational problem is already known.
102 min
How to run a service blueprint session
These steps follow the workshop guide in the 2008 paper by Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan.
- Choose one service, one customer segment and one goal. Say what the blueprint is for: a new service, a repair or training.
- Draw the customer's steps first, in time order. Expect a long talk about where the service starts and ends from the customer's side.
- Add the onstage and backstage actions, then the support processes, then the links that join each customer step to the work behind it.
- Add the physical evidence last.
- Draw the service as it typically happens, not the rare exceptions.
- Invite people from every group that designs, delivers or supports the service, and sometimes customers. Check the result with them.
- Keep looking at the customer row. Teams tend to spend the session on their own internal steps.
- Write down insights as they come up, because the act of drawing often produces the biggest ones.
- On a large effort, name one person to oversee the work and to keep the final blueprints.
When the service changes, change the blueprint. One that is not kept up to date stops matching how the service runs. A blueprint also shows where the problem is, but redesigning the process is separate work that comes after.
Smaply's advice on where to begin is to start with a journey map and blueprint only the moments where an operational problem is already clear. The critical incident technique can help find them. It asks customers to describe specific events that went well or badly, and Bitner and colleagues note that researchers have combined it with blueprinting. Pick the one moment where a customer problem keeps returning, and blueprint that first.
?3 questions
Questions people ask
How detailed should a service blueprint be?
Is onstage the same as frontstage?
Does a service blueprint show how customers feel?
§5 sources
Sources
G. Lynn Shostack, "Designing Services That Deliver", Harvard Business Review, January 1984:
Mary Jo Bitner, Amy L. Ostrom and Felicia N. Morgan, "Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation", California Management Review 50(3), 2008, a copy of the article hosted by International Hellenic University:
Sarah Gibbons, "Service Blueprints: Definition", Nielsen Norman Group, 2017:
"Service blueprint", an encyclopedia entry that summarises Shostack (1984) and later work by Zeithaml, Bitner and Gremler:
Show all 5 sourcesShow fewer sources
Joe Allen, "Customer journey map vs service blueprint: how they relate", Smaply, 2026:
