Services Design Blueprints 101

So it says that we are live, let's hope that we are.

Wait for a... Yes, we have our first few viewers. So we know that we're definitely live somewhere at least. We can start with the introduction. So let me go. Hello and welcome to Momentum officehours. My name is Yash and I'm joined by the leadership team at Momentum 91, Krishna, Jay and Koushik to discuss topic of the week, which is design blueprint for your business.

Our goal is to provide you with actionable insights and practical strategies that you can apply to your own business. Throughout the session, we encourage you to engage with us by asking questions and sharing your thoughts. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from each other and gain new insights that can help drive your business forward. Let's get started. Jay, Koushik, Krishna, how are we doing today? Doing great. Good, nice. New start of the full-on energy.

That was the last stream, so this is our second stream of the new year. Now, this last time I forgot to mention about the energy. So, is also there and our new year resolution still continues that we will still do the live. So, that's always good. That's good to know. But let's get started, Koushik.

Services blueprints for your business, with the absolute basic question, what is a services blueprint for a business? us about that. So, a service design blueprint is like the second half of what one would do after they do customer journey mapping. So, let's say you're an organization and you have multiple things. This is something that we discussed previously also.

is that you have a lot of resources lying around with respect to your company. When I say resources, we are talking about people involved, stakeholders involved, customers involved, platforms which are helping your own organization, people to cater to the customers, then processes that are in place that one should follow within the organization. And now you are at a scale where you don't have one process for any stage. have each stage pay at least

you know, two, three processes that are aligned and there's a lot happening, right? So service blueprinting is basically, it would help you to map this out from a bird's eye view with respect to it at an organizational level. And then would help you to understand where something is happening wrong. there a place where a process need to exist, but there isn't a process that's in place.

Or is there a need for a platform that needs to be built over there that could make the work for people who are involved in the organization that are your employees. Cater your customers better. Are those systems are in place? There could be situations where sometimes they are not in place. And sometimes, not sometimes, most of the times they have systems in place, but they are not talking to each other. Which again leads to inefficiency within the organization.

Service Blueprint basically helps you to map your organizational structure which involves all these items which I just explained. Got it and before we move to the next question Jay if you can Kaushik adjust the camera in such a way that your face is in the center so that you are yeah a little more perfect perfect absolutely go ahead go for it Yeah so

Koushik, I actually have two questions in mind. First of all, we did one topic related to service design. How is it different from service design blueprint? Is it like first there is a service design needed and then once you finalize certain things, then we make blueprint out of it. Can you go little deeper and explain on what's the difference between these two? And before Koushik answers, sorry, again, I'll interrupt over here because

The way that, so we do office hours weekly and then we also have podcast weekly and then we have you know momentum digest that goes out every week and we have resources and blogs and so many initiatives but the way that I didn't remember that we've already done a topic that's close to this the way that I realized that we've done this topic is because when I was scheduling this in our streaming software almost till the like when I was writing the title till the end there was an autocomplete drop down that was always there and so I was like

How does this software know that this is a topic? then that's when I saw that, there's already a stream that has happened on this topic. So Koushik, please defend yourself as to why did you choose the same topic? Yeah. Actually, after that particular stream that we had, we did have a lot of people asking us about how exactly does one go about doing service design? It's like explaining what is UX design, but that is a huge

area to cover. What is the next step? What is the byproduct? So you can think of what we are trying to do. It's a much more detailed way of so we know that blueprint need to be done but how it means to be done, how the things need to be executed, what needs to be planned, we haven't discussed that in that particular thing. Let me share my screen just a second. I would like to showcase something.

second.

Could see my screen? I'm just bringing it up in the stream. Just give me one second. Yes, we are able to see your screen. Yeah. So I think in the last stream, we discussed about something where I have showcased all these slides and we discussed about this particular blueprint. But how does one even go about arriving at this blueprint is something that we haven't discussed. How does one go about mapping it? We just directly said that this is the mapped outcome.

But the process to do it is something that I wanted to discuss much more further in detail because that clearly emphasizes how to go about mapping it such that you know why you should do it also in the same place. the first part is one could divide the whole service blueprinting process into the five stages that I mentioned here. That is about first is to find support. That is you, let's say you are,

We, in Momentum, we have an entire service design domain that helps businesses to do this exercise that we are talking now. What we try to do is we engage with the businesses and try to first try to create a cross-disciplinary team with them to find support where we can manage how to map these stakeholders and products and processes involved in it. That is, for example, let's say you have a retail store, Now you would have hundreds of retail stores at different, different places.

Now, you need to create and put systems in place such that we as people who are service designers could engage with the retail store level employees who are over there and try to understand what are the existing systems that they have and map them. Now, to arrange this in process, we need to engage with the organization and make sure that the support system and making all the stakeholders aware that this particular group

blueprinting exercise is happening is important. Next is about defining the goal of what you're trying to blueprint. Now this is very important. Now let's say that there is all I want to a company always should an organization should always have a goal of what they want to make it right. For example, I could say as an organization that I want to make my organization my employee onboarding better.

such that they have better knowledge of the product and when the customer is there at the store, they have better insights to inform the customer that eventually will lead to better sales. Now this is one particular goal that we are trying to describe that the organization would like to achieve. So then you would start mapping a new employee who is joining the organization's entire journey of how he is getting on board. And then

Let me slightly take you back. So here it won't be customer journey, this would be employee journey and you're mapping the entire employees journey over here and then you would see what all is he coming in action with, what technology is he using, is there even a, you know, some sort of induction based technology that exists that could train the employee in the right way, giving him right knowledge about the product when a customer comes into the store. So this is just one use case. So it's very important for the organization.

define the goal very specific. And then comes the research part where we are also discussing with the customers and doing enough customer research, which is very specific to the domain. Now, whenever we are trying to going forward, trying to implement systems for them or which would be as eventually the after the blueprint exercise, you would identify platforms and you would start going about implementing these platforms for them.

It could be ERP system, could be a CRM at one case, could be a Vivo IP at one case. It depends on where the loopholes are defined. Now, the point that I've... So what we will be doing is that we would also see what is the current customer's journeys that would help us extensively to understand, will give us the understanding of the domain knowledge of that particular fee. And then we do interviews with the employees also, interview with all sort of stakeholders.

And then we go about mapping the blueprint. And that is not the final step, right? After that, there is a refining step where it sticks in with all the stakeholders that we just mapped, also with the leadership team of the organization who refine this existing blueprint. There will be a lot of discussions that comes in at that particular stage.

And there will be lot of fights that happen at that particular stage where you start discussing about which is necessary, which is not necessary, what to take action upon, what not to take action upon. Very often something that we have seen is that this gives a very hard picture to the organization, where it exactly points out where they have loopholes, where they would have an assumption saying that it's functioning fine. It's actually happening, but...

then it gives them a mirror showcasing that no, it's not. And you're losing your customer here at this particular stage. So the whole point answering both your questions in a way is that what we're trying to do is we know blueprinting needs to be done, but how does one engage with the organization, collect all this data, then map it, and then sit together to create the blueprint, refine the blueprint.

and also eventually give them suggestions about how to go about implementing these platforms that would help them to do is essentially by having this discussion. think I tried to put up a defense here, but yeah. It's a fairly strong defense. I think people watching would agree for sure. But Jay, are you happy? Yes.

Got it. Good answer, right? and before we move to Krishna for her question, me take a moment and introduce. We have Krishna today, who this is her first office hours and first live. She heads all of our tech and engineering initiatives at Momentum. Everyone who builds products, everyone who implements what Koushik is talking about, hands on, all of those

people, teams, everything that is led by Krishna. So Krishna, we are expecting a like an extremely smart, very in-depth, amazing question that sounds cautious. No pressure, but please go ahead. Yeah, so I hope everyone is doing fine.

So starting, so my first question that comes to my mind is, so let's say we have built the service blueprint, then how can we find the ROI effectively? So let's say we have developed all these five steps, right? And then what tools I can use to find the ROI of whether my service blueprint is working fine or not.

To answer your question, the service blueprint is basically, it's not a result giving, it is a process where each step we would define what the ROI would be. So to give you much more, and it will be unique to what the domain is, for example. Let's say if you are some sort of specs making or similar to Lenskart, what it is doing.

kind of a retail store that exists or retail chain that exists or any sort of a retail store that exists. could be, you could be even, you know, something like a soul store which sells clothing or you could be Chumbak which is selling apparel as well as some amount of clothing also. The first item that is there that you would be mapping of your customer is the food traffic that is arriving about how many customers are entering your, you know, retail outlet.

Now this food traffic is the KPI that needs to be measured. Now that is the key measuring aspect. Now, I mean we have done this quite a number of times so I'm directly saying that food traffic metrics is something that is important. But there are a lot of brands that probably would have started at least five to six stores who are currently probably not even doing this at all. So the food traffic...

metrics that is there is something where it is the starting of the fund and you could actually arrive at understanding how you could you know how many customers are entering versus how many are getting you know doing the purchase versus where they are doing it all this data could be measured so that is the ROI part so the KPI specifically mentioning identifying the KPI which is very specific to that and also setting on the KRIs for that

So if traffic metrics needs to be measured, how do you measure it even in the first place? Should you start having some sort of systems or platforms in place which could do this, which could identify this and get the data? I could give the other end of it also. I'm just talking about the starting and ending of the journey. Like, know, very often we, whenever you do a purchase, you would see this thing that they would ask you this question.

in the store also as well as in an online experience also about how do you feel about this experience and there would be three star, it be a star based or it would be you know a bunch of smileys saying happy, very happy, not happy. The reason for why this particular question is asked at the end of the know journey of a customer is to calculate the net promoter score that you could use at the end that you could

that helps the score helps you at the end of the day to create different cohorts of your audience. Let's say that I have given, you know, amazing or if I have given just two staff, then I know that the amazing, the person who gave amazing, I could categorize them under the cohort of a loyal customer and I could give certain, you know, measurement to that particular star value that is there. And then I could target my, you know, campaigns and all my marketing strategy.

focused on that customer more because I know that I could have a recurring case built over here, built over that particular customer cohort and I could always target them with new arrivals or I could make it more targeted. So now if we didn't do the blueprint exercise and let's say if an organization exists and we did this blueprint exercise and we identified that this particular detail is not being asked from the customer.

or that particular screen has not been made in their, know, eStore, VOS systems, whatever exists. So how would I know what category of customers or cohort of customers I have? How do I know whom to target and whom not to target? So these are the very specific ROIs that you could arrive at, which is an outcome of your blueprinting.

Okay. Yeah. like it's... So, good. So, one of the things that we see as a challenge is that let's assume that I'm running, let's say a $20 million run rate business and we have 60, 70 people team manufacturing sort of a setup, right? I see all of this and

and it is extremely, how do I say it, is extremely intimidating, right? When I see that, okay, this is where my business is and this is where my, this is the direction in which my competitors are going. And just to take this initiative to start off, to kick it off, to be able to transform because the whole company needs to transform, right? They will have to change the way that they've been working.

decade maybe even more. How do I start like if I want to start small and if I want to see whether this is for us or not how do I start small and see whether this works or this doesn't work like what part of the journey do I attack and build my POC how do I go about it? That's a very important question because we are talking about so I'll give a little story

before giving reasoning for this particular thing is that in India as well as at a global level, have when the initial digital transformation or digital revolution happened, the quick captures of the market where the ones who already had enough money to implement those systems in place. So we are talking in the early 2000s when the whole thing started kicked off, just like how in AI we are seeing that

The large players always who have enough funds with them to implement this pick it up very fast. But there are players who also have similar kind of problems. We are specifically talking about SMUs and SMBs everywhere. Where who have similar kind of problem. But I mean they also they might not have hundreds of employees but they have 50 employees. They might not have they might not be processing thousands of employees in a month.

but they're still processing hundreds of invoices in a month. Now, there was always audience to cater to that segment, but there was not an audience to help these guys to digitally transform it. And this segment in every single continent, especially in continents like we are talking about, the African sector,

India, know the Southeast Asian sector who had more geography, geography not sector. The geography, yeah. We saw a lot of these companies got stuck or you know organization got stuck with this. Now coming back to that question, the competition actually reminds them about the fact that you know they are left out, very often. I mean you are doing business

the money is coming in, you can see that customers are some or the other interested in what you are trying to sell it be a product or a service. But there is something that going wrong in trying to convert them at the last stage. Either the purchase is not happening because the service that was being provided at the store was not right or when the customers... So think of it like this, when a customer comes to a store or...

We are specifically talking retail with an example, most of times we are talking because it's very easy to connect for the audience also, that's a reason. So when customer is visiting a store, has not made up his mind yet. He is coming and your store is trying to convince him or it is the stage where he doing the research about your product. So it is extremely important of how your service is offered at the store.

That is, and as well as, you know, how much knowledge of the product the employees who are in the store have, as well as how well can they, are they able to sell it. Right. Now this, we can see that SMEs and SMEs or anyone who is trying to scale from that stage to a larger stage will face this, start having these problems. And it's a competition which should constantly remind them the fact that my systems are not in place and, you know, I don't have everything under my control.

And then other way is that every business owner wants to have that, you know, the dream one screen dashboard where they can control everything from or that one platform from which they can control everything from. And the good news is that service blueprinting will help you to arrive at that platform. That is the best part about the thing where the top level leadership team that is having will have extreme visibility.

about what is happening within the organization at different silo level. could talk and you could also as a leadership team level person you could say how each silo is affecting the other silo. How my marketing and my sales are not talking to each other and how are they affecting and where am I losing the effort as well as the money with respect to my you know my whole business could be identified and could be solved specifically.

That's exactly what we are trying to build here. And you cannot scale after that. The only way for you to scale is to make sure that your systems are in place and are working, you know, just like a bell oil engine. if you're making it go fast, the engine should work. the engine should work. need to sure that you service it and oil it properly. So, that's what we at Momentum try to do with organization.

So we help them in this entire journey identifying the pitfalls and so at end of the day the byproduct would be a ERP system and most of the cases it is not just an ERP system that is established. There are multiple platforms which are built upon that which talks to the ERP system and collects the data and your ERP system is basically the one stop where you are trying to manage it.

But yeah, it's mostly the competition and then it's mostly the fact that they realize that they are losing money without even spending it heavily on the product. Now where is it actually getting lost? So that's when it hits the ground. Got it. Got it.

So, especially with respect to service design blueprint, should there be more focus towards the end customers or should there be more focus towards the own staff? know that it's a mixture of both and it's a complete thing because the staff will in itself be serving the customers but is there anyone who is kept in centre while you know designing these processes or aligning

each and every part of it? I think the best way to answer your question is that the customer is always in the center, that's for sure. If the organization has already identified different cohorts of the customer, then different cohorts will have very unique, not unique, pretty much similar, but the kind of interactions that they're having within their journey will be very interesting, you observed.

for each cohort of people who are coming in. A loyal customer's journey versus a new customer will be very different with respect to how each systems are talking to them and are each systems even talking to them. So customer is always in the center of this journey. But increasingly we have seen that creating separate journeys for employees are also equally important because we have employees who are joining because

The well it works, so your employee is the first touch point after your product. Think of it that way. So how well the employee knows about the product or understands the product and how well will decide the value of the service that you are providing as an organization to your customer. So mapping that particular journey of that employee who is coming in for the first time or the employee who is already there.

or we have seen provide significant results of mapping those and seeing what all systems are in place or needed to be in place with respect to their journey also. Apart from this, there have been situations where we have mapped even a third party vendor or a third party who is involved their journey also and see has that been done efficiently. So I have been working with this third party person.

third party vendor, could be any other organization also. But how is my current interaction or my current journey with them has it worked out or not? So even certain companies use this to evaluate that relation also. Or should we bring something else in place to make this, you know, because there might be significant dependency on this particular third party vendor for fulfilling the orders or anything of that sort. Because most of the time if you are a retail chain who is, you know,

the phase of planning to scale. We have observed a lot of times when the product has been purchased but the delivery is mostly probably handled by third party system that's in place. So mapping that would also help us to understand how well is it happening because that's the very crucial stage where it should reach and I'm not doing it. It's a other party that is helping to do it. So there are different cases that come.

This brings back to, I think the best way to answer this question is that it brings back to this one point that what is the goal that you're trying to achieve by doing your service as an organization? Are you trying to make, are you saying that no, there are a lot of, you can't solve all problems at the same time. Obviously you have to solve it face by face. You're saying that I have a huge problem with my customer's journey. My customers are not getting converted. My customers don't even have clear knowledge about my product. Then customers.

will you are center of your attention or then let's say that no I have customers who are coming in I have a great set of customers who know about my product and coming in and visiting my store and buying it you know usual or at a regular time in turn then but it's the employee who I have a you know I need to set up my I have hundreds of employees spread across you know n number of locations I don't know I

I don't know which employees at what store doing what. So how do you handle this situation? Like I said, he's the first, he's literally like the hands of your organization. He's the first person to reach out. So then that becomes a priority. So it's about defining the goal about what problem do you want to solve first as an organization? And then the service designer or the organization like us,

come in and help you more efficiently identifying there and you know work at both and we can also optimize the speed at a much more better way when we clearly know what to do.

So that does indicate that especially when you are looking forward to you know have a service design blueprint implementation you need a consultant at least who can just first guide you on your path rather than it's not a templatized thing where you just have to impose this know set of things or services it's more about a customized solution based on your needs so your needs needs to be defined and then whole processes can be aligned accordingly. Yeah exactly.

There is a slightly template like for example I can show you the template that you follow. Do you see my screen?

One second. No, I cannot bring it on the... Can you share it again? Yeah. All this while were you on that screen? Because it was not on the screen. No, no, no. I was just trying to open it. got it.

Do you see it now? Yeah, one second. I'll just bring it. Yes, we can see it now. For example, this is an Excel sheet that is there where you could see that, you know, this is like a templatized version of it where you could basically see the way it is arranged is that the phases are basically could be different phase of your customer. Let's say customer is what you're trying to match. The phase one would be, you know, where he's trying to know about your product. Phase two could be where he's, you know,

trying to do research about your product. 3 could be him getting, he's doing the purchase, phase 4 could be after purchase. You know, it depends on the stakeholder that you're trying to map. what is, evidence is basically where are they in you and then customer actions is where, what action are they doing. For example, when they enter the store, what sort of initial customer action or how are they coming to know about your product.

or your store even in the first place. So what is the action? Where are they doing it? So it could be a website, could be just, you know, or the store is so well designed from a store front and it's being seen from the outside also, or it could be the digital, you know, banners or whatever it is. Then comes front stage actions. That is what sort of platforms or people that are in place who are reaching out to the customer first.

For example, at a stage where let's say that I'm doing a purchase and in that state, the system should be in place. So now what sort of a but at the same time.

At the same time, when the customer is just looking around in the store, should all the people who are in the store trying to help the customer to make the decision should also have another tablet. You might have seen this video, they will have a tablet or something where they also have the entire product information across all the stores. So you might be having something in stock, not in stock, but when the customer says that, but I do need it right.

and I like the product. You don't want to lose that customer. So you don't immediately run to the billing chaos every single time. Rather you have a in-store POS which everyone has access to. That is every employee in the store has access to who can quickly see through it and give them the right information on their own. So these kind of things, identifying them would come in different ways. So this is templatized, but like you mentioned, we can't

say that this is exactly how every customer, every domain is going to experience it. Within Zara, how Zara's customer would experience Zara store versus how someone who is visiting Seoul store which is again in the same clothing retail domain but the way both the stores are experienced and the systems are in place and the service is given is very different.

You feel it different, right? Because it is done differently. Zara at a scale, the scale at where they are, they have done these kind of exercises at an extensive level and they belong to a huge chain of other brands too. So there's a lot of shared knowledge that comes from that. whereas Soul has started from, it's very different to your scale at Soul Store. People know Soul Store more in from an online presence rather than an offline presence.

And suddenly when they see offline retail store, are more interested in seeing that, right? There's a factor built around it where they want to see that offline store, does it have? So now they have to outperform their own online experience in the retail store, which means the service given by the employees involved should be at that range and that level. And what systems do they have in in case to give that sort of experience to their customer is again a question.

So there is a template, but no experience can be a template.

So Jay, while I was listening to this answer from Koushik, I got answered to another question. I mean, it is very separate, which is absolutely different from what Koushik was talking about. When he was sharing the screen, I sort of started to realize that when you and I go in for our consulting conversations, which are the first conversations that you and I have with our prospects, they are not that sure.

as to whether they want to go ahead with us or not but then as soon as they make a decision and they go ahead with us these are the sort of templates that Koushik shows to them and then their conviction is built that these are the guys right so maybe we should have access to these documents and templates that like office hours is learning for us also when we are talking to prospects these templates will help us Koushik to build confidence also

So please share those with us as well, not just with our viewers who have joined in on this and happy to report that this is the most viewed live it seems like up until now. But with that good news, I must share that we are coming to the end of this conversation as well.

Krishna again, thank you for joining us and hope to have you join in on all of our future live sessions as well. just before we, yeah, sorry, Krishna, you were saying something. Yeah, for sure. I I really got some good insights on the service. Yeah, and it's also, and I hope that we are also fun, like just fun people to hang out with. This is not the only thing that we talk about.

So, you're also like good fun people as well. And so, before we sign off though, one thing that I wanted to share was that our social media analytics team was sharing with me. They were telling me that only 1 % of the people who watch these streams are subscribed to our channel or they follow our page. And so, I mean, if you want to be part of the 1 % club, please subscribe.

So this subscription, I have already spoken to YouTube and LinkedIn. This subscription is completely free. We have a special deal for you and in zero dollars, you will become part of the 1 % club. Thank you for joining. Thank you for listening and we hope to see you again in our next streams. Until next time. Bye.