The Difference Between a Journey Map and a Service Blueprint

Everything that happens in our lives is a type of journey. It might be a journey that
spans a few minutes, a few years, or an entire lifetime. It could be going to college, the
birth of your first child, or a memorable vacation. These journeys don’t just happen on
their own. Out of our view, there’s a whole orchestration going on to create the
conditions for them to happen.

During that college experience, hundreds or thousands of people were working to keep
the college running. Hospitals and doctors were providing care making education and
support accessible to the soon-to-be parents. The airline, hotel, and cruise companies
were working to keep everything they produce and manage working so you can have
that vacation experience with as little friction as possible.

Mapping these experiences is a key part of being a human-centered business, and it is

important to look at both perspectives — what the person experiences, and what went
on outside of their view to make it happen. Customer journey mapping and service
blueprinting are two complementary methods that can help us see both sides of our
services.

Yet these two methods are often confused; what is a journey map, and what is a service
blueprint, and how are they different?

Set the stage

Before we dive in, we need a little context. We need to understand the notion of “the
stage” in service design, a cornerstone concept that is essential for understanding the
difference between customer journeys and service blueprints. “The stage” is comprised
of three perspectives: the front stage, the backstage, and the behind-the-scenes.

The literal metaphor is helpful here. If you imagine a simple stage in a theater, the front
stage is where the action happens and what the audience can see; for us, customers
act on the front stage.

The backstage is where all the support processes live that produce the front stage, the
lights, the sets, the crew, all of which should be invisible to the customer, but often isn’t.
The backstage is us, the organization and all the things we do to make that front stage
happen.

Then there is the behind-the-scenes, where all the intangible things that the
organization must do to make both the front and backstage possible. Rules, regulations,
policies, budgets; all the things that aren’t really a part of either the front or back stage.

These three places are where service design has the opportunity to make an impact.
Through different methods, we can better understand different stages. Let’s talk about
the methods in question.
What is a journey map?
A journey map captures iconic experiences that customers have, from their point of
view; the front stage of the service experience. In creating a journey map, you use
customer narratives and customer data to plot their experience over time, mapping what
they are doing, thinking, and feeling, and what they are interacting with along the way.
What you end up with is a visceral journey that helps you see and evaluate the
experience your customer is having from their point of view.

A good journey tells the story of what the customer went through as a narrative that
flows like an author wrote it; the author being the customer. It contains all the richness
of the experience — the emotion, the internal dialog, the highs and lows — that a true
story would. It’s our chance as creators to step into the customer’s shoes and “see” how
they would experience it. Empathy at its core.

You can create a journey map by interviewing customers to capture their insights, and
then map them against each other to find commonalities, patterns, and trends. In
addition, you can also piece together a customer journey map from data that is already
being collected on the customer experience.

This method helps you map and make visible the end-to-end of the experience a
customer has. This is the front stage of the experience, and is comprised of all the
interactions they have in the context of their lives and how they interface with your
business.

Beyond capturing the current experience your customers are going through, journey
mapping can also be used to imagine and ideate on the future, using the format as a
tool to speculate on what a customer might see and do in a future experience.

Typically, a journey map is not a depiction of an actual real-world, single customer’s

experience. A journey map is an aggregate of experiences compiled from customer
research and the knowledge of subject-matter experts in your organization.

The nature of how customers traverse the stage is unique to every single customer, but
when you aggregate those paths together into a narrative, it helps you see the
experience as a journey from the customer’s perspective.

This is a powerful storytelling tool that paints a picture and allows people a chance to
see something through a common lens. Journey mapping builds empathy and also lets
you identify areas of the experience that you want to improve or learn more about.

What is a service blueprint?

Now let’s turn to service blueprinting. Where journey mapping focuses on exposing the
end-to-end of your customer’s front stage experience, blueprinting focuses on exposing
the surface-to-core of the business that makes up the backstage and behind the scenes
of how you deliver and operate, and ties that to the customer’s experience.
What journey maps and customer narratives don’t show is the internal workings of the
organization. The service blueprint seeks to uncover and document (often for the first
time!) all the things that go on beneath the surface and the internal makeup of the
organization that creates it. It is data visualization of how your company works; the
deep, dark inner workings of how the things a customer experiences are actually
produced.

There are huge complexities that go unseen that are the support structures beneath
every journey — the responsibilities of the internal actors, the systems that support
those actors, all the processes and policies that dictate what can and cannot be done.
Service blueprinting shows you a picture that not only includes the breadth of what
happens along the journey, but all the depth that makes up the substance that the
journey traverses across.

Building the blueprint

To create a service blueprint, you first need to have identified one or more end-to-end
journeys, called scenarios, that you want to blueprint. These scenarios should be based
in the customer journey, but can also include organizational scenarios that happen
internally away from the customer’s view. It is the story of what happens at each step
along the way to make the scenario “go.”

By going deep into each step in the scenario, you can expose the breadth and depth of
the experience that supports and produces the stage where the journey takes place.
This process relies on a cross-functional collaboration between different parts of the
organization, in order to represent all aspects of the external and internal experience.

The end results is a complete picture of how the experience is delivered, end-to-end
and surface-to-core. It is a powerful document that simultaneously gives you a high
level view of the experience, and at the same time a detailed view into what is going on
under the surface, moment-to-moment. Without this comprehensive surface-to-core
view of who we are as an organization and our part in this journey we are creating, we
can’t make meaningful changes to how we serve our customers.

The difference between the two

While journey mapping can help you document surface customer experiences, service
blueprinting helps you “evidence” the reality of your organization. The fundamental
value a blueprint provides is an objective picture, based in the reality of how your
organization delivers, what they deliver, and the end-to-end view of how it is
orchestrated.

There are many journeys and many customers, but there’s only one of your business,
only one collection of systems, policies, and actors that make up what you offer. That is
what the blueprint uncovers; the backstage that is used over and over again by the
customers. We map customer experiences all the time, but rarely do we take the time to
map out and document our own businesses.
An experience is only as cohesive as the teams that produce it, and any attempt to
make meaningful changes to an experience requires a deep understanding of the
makeup of the organization that builds the stage for that experience. Blueprinting is not
about documenting the customer experience. It uses the customer experience as
starting point, and unpacks it to expose how the organization supports that journey.

This is why a blueprint can seem detached from the customer and detached from the
empathy that designers are told again and again is the top priority. It’s important to point
out that the blueprint doesn’t seek to remove the empathetic aspect of design, and is
not in conflict with a journey map’s purpose — it is simply focusing on a different
dimension of that experience; the substrate it is created from. It is the objective answer
to the question of “What does our organization consist of, both tangibly and intangibly,
that allows these journeys to exist?”

A customer journey can only exist on what an organization can deliver; it is confined to
and constrained by your internal capability. By taking a big step back and using the
blueprint to truly see the end-to-end and surface-to-core all together as one, it grants
you the freedom to then make big or small changes to how your organization delivers,
which results in the improvement and evolution of the customer journeys it supports.

When to use what method

If you don’t have an understanding of how your customers are experiencing what you
offer, then journey mapping is a great way to uncover that, make it tangible for your
organization, and build empathy around the customer.

A journey can tell a rich story about what happens to a person that is hard to capture if
it’s not turned into a narrative. That narrative is a powerful tool to rally a group around
true human-centered design, and that can be an end unto itself.

If you already have a good understanding of your customer experience, or identified a

particular pain point for the customer or the internal teams, then blueprinting should be
your next step.

It will allow you to dive deep into how you deliver an experience and how your
organization functions (for better or worse), allowing you to address organizational pain
and breakdown of processes internally. The cross-functional collaboration it fosters
brings diverse organizational knowledge into a central place for the first time.

However, don’t just go chasing customer pain. There are cases when a customer’s
experience can be perfectly delightful, but behind-the-scenes the organization is going
to great lengths to patch it together and maintain the appearance of cohesion.

In reality, you might be losing tremendous amounts of time, money, and employee
moral by maintaining a great customer experience by using inefficient and painful
internal processes. In cases like these, you might consider using the journey mapping
tool to map the emotional experiences of your internal actors in order to understand
organizational pain, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.

Blueprinting is an obvious must in these cases, because it will help you understand the
complexities of your organization, and let you tie underlying factors to a customer
journey so that you don’t lose sight of how future changes — in the form of reduced
costs, increased efficiency, boosted moral, and the overall health of the business itself
— might impact the customer.

We have to pay attention to these internal organizational experiences just as much as

we pay attention to the customer experience.

Conclusion
Journey mapping and service blueprinting are both critical methods to understand and
use in doing service design work. It is important to understand the difference between
the two, and how they complement each other. Journey mapping is about a front stage
lens through which to better understand and empathize with the customer’s experience.

Blueprinting is about the backstage (and behind-the-scenes) of your business and how
that backstage ties to the customer’s experience. Whether you are seeking deeper
understanding of the experience your organization has created, or a deep analysis of
your business, these methods will help you identify ways to create meaningful
improvements to your internal processes and your customer’s experiences.

The next time you look at a customer journey, try digging beneath the surface to look
down to the core of what is supporting that journey. Understanding how it all adds up to
create that surface customer journey means now you know. And knowing is half the
battle.