Service Blueprint Template
Map the processes that drive a service experience – and find ways to improve!
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Service Blueprint Template
Service blueprints are useful tools for understanding and designing a service experience – and finding ways to improve it. Learn more about them and start creating your own using Miro's free service blueprint template.
What is a service blueprint diagram?
The service blueprint diagram was first introduced by G. Lynn Shostack in 1984. Shostack wanted to find a way to visualize the steps that go into a service process, taking into account the customer’s perspective. Service blueprint diagrams make it simpler for teams to design new processes or improve existing ones.
To create a service blueprint diagram, map out each process and actor that contributes to the customer experience, from in-house contributors to third-party vendors. Service blueprint templates generally contain five elements:
Physical evidence, such as brick-and-mortar stores, websites, customer receipts, or emails.
Customer actions, like visiting your website, placing an order, or asking a customer service question.
Frontstage (visible) employee actions, such as sending confirmation emails or answering customer questions.
Backstage (invisible) employee actions, such as writing website content or filling orders.
Support processes, like third-party delivery systems or vendors who provide software or supplies.
When to use a service blueprint template
Teams use service blueprints for a variety of applications. Many draw them up to make it easier to transfer knowledge across teams and to new team members. By clarifying roles and processes, you can reduce silos and inefficiencies. Service blueprint diagrams also allow you to compare your company’s services with competitors’, or to bridge the gap between how you want your service to function and how it functions currently.
Service blueprint template advantages
Service blueprints are scalable and flexible, showing as much or as little detail as you want, from overviews to complex steps. Team members working on intricate processes can easily lose sight of the bigger picture or how actions affect other departments, fellow team members, or customers. Once you zoom in on current functions, you can more easily diagnose and address issues and fill gaps.
How to create your own service blueprint template
It’s easy to create your own blueprint template. Miro allows you to build, share, and iterate. Get started by selecting the service blueprint template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
1. Start with a customer scenario. Whether you’re mapping an existing process or creating one from scratch, it’s crucial to start with the customer service scenario that you’d like to investigate. If you can, interview customers to gain a realistic perspective of the scenario.
2. Map out the experience. Now, plot the actions that the customer will take, in chronological order.
3. Build out the map. Once you have the customer’s journey mapped out, it’s time to build out the rest of the story. Lay out the processes, actors, support systems, and technologies that exist behind the scenes.
4. Dive into roles and responsibilities. Miro’s whiteboard allows you to customize your map with colors, visuals, and more. Use these tools to parse out roles and responsibilities. Specify lines of interaction, where the customer interacts with your service or employees; lines of visibility, where your organizational processes become invisible to the customer; and lines of internal action, where employees who don’t come in contact with the customer nevertheless step in to support the service.
5. Illustrate cross-functional relationships. Miro’s tools help you add more detail to your service blueprint by including arrows. Use arrows to illustrate relationships and dependencies that cross-cut various steps in the map. Most people like to use a single arrow to indicate that a role flows in that direction, while a double arrow means that two roles are interdependent.
Dive even deeper into how to make a service blueprint – and see examples – in our expert guide to servicing blueprinting.
Why is service blueprint important?
The service blueprint template can provide a complete overview of ongoing performance and identify opportunities to improve customer experience and, therefore, positively impact your business or organization.
What are the components of a service blueprint?
The service blueprint template originally is made of 5 components: physical evidence, customer actions, frontstage and backstage employee actions, and support process.
Why is service blueprint important for service type of businesses?
The blueprint template is essential when you want to identify the visible and not visible interactions between your customers and your services, touchpoints and optimize customer experience and consumer journey.
Get started with this template right now.
Concept Map Template
Works best for:
Education, Mapping, Brainstorming
Use the concept map template to create new ideas, structure your thoughts, and bring your innovations to life. It allows you to explore connections between concepts and let your creativity flow in an organized format. As a result, you’re able to visualize how to bring your new ideas to reality and how various concepts relate to each other.
App Development Canvas Template
Works best for:
Market Research, Product Management, User Experience
Ever noticed that building a successful app requires lots of players and moving parts? If you’re a project manager, you definitely have. Lucky for you, an app development canvas will let you own and optimize the entire process. It features 18 boxes, each one focusing on a key aspect of app development, giving you a big-picture view. That way you can fine-tune processes and get ahead of potential problems along the way—resulting in a smoother path and a better, tighter product.
UX Research Plan Template
Works best for:
Market Research, Desk Research, User Experience
A research plan communicates the fundamental information that stakeholders need to understand about a user experience research project: who, what, why, and when. The plan ensures everyone is aligned and knows what they must do to make the UX research project a success. Use the research plan to communicate background information about your project; objectives; research methods; the scope of the project, and profiles of the participants. By using a UX research plan, you can achieve stakeholder buy-in, stay on track, and set yourself up for success.
Buyer Persona Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, User Experience
You have an ideal customer: The group (or few groups) of people who will buy and love your product or service. But to reach that ideal customer, your entire team or company has to align on who that is. Buyer personas give you a simple but creative way to get that done. These semi-fictional representations of your current and potential customers can help you shape your product offering, weed out the “bad apples,” and tailor your marketing strategies for serious success.
Darts Template
Works best for:
Design
It is a common mistake to assume that all ideas, tasks, or features are equally important. However, in order to achieve the best results and focus on the most critical elements, it is necessary to determine what takes priority. This approach allows you to prioritize and concentrate on what requires immediate attention while postponing the remaining aspects for later. The Darts Template is designed to limit the amount of content that can be placed in the center, forcing your team to consider priorities before taking any action.
OKR Planning Template
Works best for:
Strategic Planning, Meetings, Workshops
The OKR Planning template helps you turn exhaustive OKR sessions into dynamic and productive meetings. Use this template to make OKR planning more interactive, guiding your team through the session with creative Ice Breakers and Brainstorms, so you can co-create your OKRs and define the key results and action plans to achieve them.