Service Map
What is a Service Map workshop?
This workshop tactic gets you and your team to create a map of a service, allowing you to understand it better and identify opportunities for improving processes.
A service map communicates the front- and back-stage actors in a service. Understanding how all these actors interact with each other, and ultimately the customer, can reveal bottlenecks or areas for improvement.
Try running Journey Map beforehand, as it will help you with the first part of this tactic. Afterwards, Impact Effort Map your ideas to decide which to take forward.
Service Map Miro Template
How to run a Service Map workshop
1. Find a large surface and mark out space for four rows.
2. Customer: on sticky notes, write the steps your user takes in a typical scenario. For example: presses button, waits, enters elevator, avoids eye contact with other humans, etc.
3. Front stage: on the second row, write what visible things the user interacts with at each step of your service. For example: an elevator button, floor level indicator, the interior of the lift.
4. Back Stage: on the third row, for each step - write what happens behind the scenes that the customer doesn’t see. For example: an elevator descending.
5. Ideas: review the map with the group and identify opportunities to improve parts of the service. Capture these ideas on their own row at the bottom.
Tip: it can help to draw arrows to signify the flow of interaction between different layers.
Origin: G. Lynn Shostack, 1984
Not sure if this is the right approach for your team at the moment? Try a different tactic for understanding the problems and challenges you face. Or if you’re happy that you know what the next big challenge is for your team, try a framing tactic to help you articulate your problem, ready for solving.
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Service Map is one of 54 workshop recipe cards inside the Workshop Tactics card deck.
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