Editorial
The Gist
- Design failures go deeper than pixels. Customer frustrations often stem from broken service design, not just flawed interfaces.
- Journey maps aren’t enough. They capture what customers see and feel, but not the internal systems and silos that create those experiences.
- Service blueprints connect the dots. By visualizing both frontstage and backstage processes, they help teams spot “crevasses” where customers fall through the cracks.
Where Design Breaks Down
Many issues that customers experience with websites, apps or digital products often tie back to how well or how poorly the underlying service was designed. When a customer received an error message while trying to log into her installment loan account, the problem wasn’t with a pixel or the login feature.
Instead, it was related to her original lender being acquired by another bank and their transition process. She and other customers received incorrect passwords during the bank transition. No communication was made to customers about the issue unless they called in to report the problem.
Table of Contents
- Limitations of Customer Journey Maps
- The Role of Service Blueprints
- Simple Tasks Get Complicated in an Omnichannel World
- Larger Organizations More Crevasses
Limitations of Customer Journey Maps
While a customer journey map might be used to identify pain points in a customer's journey, alone it might not get to the root cause. Many organizations use customer journey maps to visually show each step a customer takes when interacting with a brand.
Beyond the Customer View
These maps focus on the customer’s perspective (what the customer sees, feels, and does) not the internal processes, systems or teams within the organization that power those experiences to happen.
For example, a customer journey map might highlight the customers' frustration at the login not working and not being able to use the “Forgot Password” feature as pain points, but it would not necessarily identify the internal issues that caused these login problems. It would not explain why no internal review caught the error or why no proactive communications were issued to notify customers.
In trying to determine the source of the incorrect passwords, the number of teams involved in the bank conversion from IT, operations, customer service, marketing/communications, compliance/risk management, training, etc. are just a sample of the web of people, processes and systems involved delivering services.
Related Article: The Complete Guide to Customer Journey Mapping
The Role of Service Blueprints
In complex omnichannel experiences, service blueprints are a great tool for understanding the full scope of service delivery. Service blueprints show both what the customers see (the front stage) and the people, processes, and systems behind the scenes necessary to deliver services (the backstage). When used together, customer journey maps and service blueprints can highlight both the customer perspective and help design the supporting actions to deliver better services.
Not as many organizations in the US are familiar with or utilize service blueprints as customer journey maps.
To dig deeper into service blueprinting, I spoke with Andy Polaine, a design leadership coach and service design expert, who is also a co-author of the recently released "Service Design (2nd edition)."
Andy noted that organizations typically have had an industrialized mindset developed around producing physical products, where it was easier for departments to be siloed.
Bridging the Crevasse
While organizations today deliver many more services, they still operate in silos.
To be delivered effectively, services often require collaboration of different teams, processes and systems that reach across the organization which makes silos even more problematic. Customers experience services across various touchpoints, including digital, app, in-person experience, etc. and often managed by different teams. How many times a day does someone browse online, then orders through an app and picks up the purchase at the store?
Andy calls the area between individual teams’ responsibilities where customer experience often fails “crevasses,” because it’s like a small crack in the ice, which is possible to jump over, but if you fall in, you’re lost. I call it the “messy middle” because this is where customers often find that no one is responsible.
Simple Tasks Get Complicated in an Omnichannel World
Funny enough, both Andy and I have stories about electric companies that illustrate this issue. In my example, a customer’s bill was paid online. Then, a few days later, they received an email stating that the payment had been “cancelled," “returned” and “accepted.” Despite three calls to the electrical company, the customer service reps could not tell the customer what happened and could only send a request to another department to investigate the payment that was processed by their third party vendor.
Andy shared an example of an electrical company that instructed customers to read their own meter and report their usage using the QR code provided. However, the QR code did not work on their phone, laptop or tablet. Instead, they received a message about an “internal server error” and had to search for where to report their usage. There was a disconnect between what was communicated and where the task had to be accomplished, which typically in enterprise organizations are different teams.
In both electric cases, the customers had an issue completing simple tasks related to receiving electricity (paying a bill and reporting usage) that went much deeper than an interface problem.
Instead of silos, Andy emphasizes the need for a service ecosystem approach, where you map the connections in service delivery, identifying where people are coming from and where they are going (channels, touchpoints, tasks, etc.) and orchestrate service delivery by designing overlapping responsibilities that cross each endpoint. This way, customers don’t get lost in “crevasse” and the complexity of the service delivery is shared among teams.
Layers Beneath Customer Frustration
This table highlights the deeper takeaways from the article — focusing on how organizations can evolve from isolated journey maps to fully connected service blueprints.
| Theme | Key Takeaway | Action for CX Leaders |
|---|---|---|
| Root cause of CX failures | Customer issues often stem from misaligned service design, not visual or interface flaws. | Investigate back-end systems and handoffs, not just customer-facing touchpoints. |
| Journey map limitations | Journey maps show what customers feel but miss the internal dynamics that shape those experiences. | Pair journey maps with service blueprints to expose operational friction and silos. |
| Service blueprint value | Blueprints reveal the backstage processes, dependencies and handoffs that power customer experiences. | Use blueprints to redesign how teams and systems coordinate across the customer lifecycle. |
| Cross-team collaboration | Teams working in isolation create “crevasses” — gaps where customer needs fall through. | Design overlapping responsibilities that encourage shared ownership of customer outcomes. |
| Omnichannel complexity | Disconnected digital and physical channels amplify confusion for both staff and customers. | Adopt a service ecosystem approach that connects channels and clarifies accountability across them. |
| Scaling with structure | As organizations grow, the number of potential “crevasses” increases exponentially. | Continuously revisit blueprints to maintain coherence and adapt to new products or channels. |
Larger Organizations More Crevasses
As we continue to have larger, more diversified organizations with many channels, the potential for these “crevasse” are even greater. Consider a “product-led” organizational model, multiple teams may be responsible for individual parts of a customer journey. Even with close coordination, teams can remain siloed, particularly when they are incentivized to optimize their team’s part of the journey.
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Expanding your customer journey map to include a service blueprint approach enables you to map out and orchestrate different areas of responsibility and complexity internally that drive the customer experiences.
Therefore, a customer doesn’t fall into a “crevasse” where no one is responsible or even aware. These “crevasses” are critical points where customers may decide to go elsewhere or become discouraged from furthering their relationship with your organization.
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