Only the Tip of the Iceberg
After pulling together Customer Journey Maps, and having a pretty good idea of the current customer experience, we wanted to focus on something that’s easily forgotten - staff experience.
What about the people behind the customer experiences? How did they feel about their daily tasks? What did they think about the processes and the systems that consume them? What were the pain points they felt?
All of this creeps into the customer’s experience too.
The Whole Truth
We found the best approach to give us a holistic understanding of the staff experience was to develop a Service Blueprint.
For me, a Service Blueprint is just a visual representation - on one page - of how a service is delivered. Some areas in a Blueprint may be painfully obvious, but we found many areas to be very invisible and elusive, known only by one or two people in the organisation.
This Nielson Norman Group primer is a great guide on how to get started.
Our Service Blueprint comprised of the typical 5 main elements:
Customer journey, including evidence and time: We had this already, and it formed the starting point and backbone.
Frontstage actions: Actions or experiences from staff that can be seen by customers.
Backstage actions: Actions or experiences from staff that happen behind the scenes, supporting frontstage actions.
Supporting processes: Internal processes or steps that support staff in their frontstage/backstage actions.
Pain points and delight points: We used digital post-it notes attached to each action/process to symbolise pain points and delight points experienced by the staff and customers.
There’s lots of material online to find out more, and Nielson Norman Group’s definition is a good one.
Also, I'm no Service Designer and having one helped immensely. We were fortunate enough to work with the super talented Lisa Johnson.
After rounds and rounds of collaborative workshops, this was the latest iteration of our Service Blueprint*, created in Miro, split into two parts:
* Intentionally low-resolution for confidentiality reasons.
The One Biggest Learning
The biggest learning from this experience that I can share is - just start. Start small. Start with whatever bits you know. Maybe even start with parts composed of assumptions (but definitely clarify with others later).
Service Blueprints can feel overwhelmingly complex to create, but once I started, it kind of felt like it started building itself.
Next Steps
Creating the Service Blueprint helped us immensely to:
Really understand staff experiences, pain points and opportunities for improvement
Share this understanding with stakeholders and the wider organisation, facilitating empathy and investment in improving the status quo
Of course, having a Blueprint didn’t actually change the status quo just yet. More on where we went from there later…