THE BACKSTAGE

Failures usually start where the customer can’t see: a warehouse cutoff, a tracking app that doesn’t talk to the email tool, a helpdesk that can’t see order status. The service blueprint is the tool for that half of the map.

Shostack’s blueprint

G. Lynn Shostack, then a senior vice president at Bankers Trust, introduced the service blueprint in Harvard Business Review in 1984. Her method has four steps: identify the processes, isolate the fail points, set a time frame for each step, and analyze profitability. The blueprint separates what the customer sees from what happens behind it with a “line of visibility”, and marks each place the service is likely to go wrong with an F Published. Her example was a shoeshine: a standard execution time of two minutes, and a customer who would tolerate up to five before thinking less of the service Published. That’s a target window, the same idea as chapter 5.

Mary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom and Felicia Morgan turned it into a practical technique in California Management Review in 2008. Their blueprint has five layers: physical evidence, customer actions, onstage contact employee actions, backstage contact employee actions and support processes, split by a line of interaction, a line of visibility and a line of internal interaction Published.

Their cases include ARAMARK Parks and Resorts, which blueprinted its Lake Powell houseboat vacations and redesigned around the gaps. The authors report that ARAMARK saw “50 percent fewer complaints” and repeat business up 12 percent afterward Reported. That’s one company’s before-and-after, not a controlled test, so read it as what’s possible, not what to expect.

When a touch fails, look below the line of visibility first. The email is rarely the problem. The system that was supposed to trigger it usually is.

A DTC blueprint for one stretch

For a DTC brand the “employees” are mostly systems. Here’s the stretch from order to delivery, with fail points marked:

Every fail point in that table sits at a handoff between two systems or two teams. That’s the typical pattern, and it’s why a stage needs an owner who can see both sides of every handoff (chapter 10). The Kept Promise covers fixing the delivery stretch itself.

Blueprint the stall, not everything

Don’t blueprint the whole journey. Blueprint the stall from chapter 4, and the stall in time from chapter 5 if it differs, one page each. For first use the backstage is often thin: a how-to email written at launch and no signal feeding back. That’s a finding too.

Do this

• Draw the blueprint for your stall with whoever runs operations, retention and support, in one hour. Five columns as above. Mark every fail point with an F, and for each one name the system and the person who can fix it.