This is a chapter from the EDGY Cookbook (load complete PDF version of the EDGY Cookbook from this link).
Experience
Experience defines people’s tasks and journeys, and with which channels they interact with the products and/or services of the enterprise. The tasks define what people are doing: what are their needs, what are the jobs to be done, and what they want to achieve. Through journeys it is possible to define what are the activities, and the steps they are taking when they are achieving their tasks. Experience is a personal view of the enterprise, which is observed from a person’s perspective, focusing on the value created for people. Experience is supported by architecture, which is needed to create products and services, which are supporting people’s tasks in their journeys.
Experience = The impact through interactions the enterprise has on people and their lives.
Enterprise Design
The Enterprise Design is a holistic, coherent, and human-centric approach for designing better enterprises. Enterprise Design utilizes the EDGY language to enable collaboration between disciplines, leverages on collaboration and encourages to co-design.
The Enterprise Design approach is based three facets: 1) identity, 2) experience and 3) architecture, together with their intersections: a) organisation, b) brand and c) product. All these facets and their intersections exist in typical enterprises, no matter the size or scope. These facets and intersections form the Facet Model, which can be used for asking questions for designing and reframing all kinds of design challenges. The Facet Model can be used as an analysis tool to shift perspectives and reframe challenges into new ideas – from different angles.
As a holistic, coherent, human-centric and collaborative approach, the Enterprise Design tackles the following problems: isolated design disciplines, diverse methods and separated tools, different terminologies, different visualisation languages, lack of communication over practices and organisation units, different substance- and subject matter experts etc.
The Enterprise Design enables people in enterprises to collaborate, communicate and create shared designs, in all the change activities and business transformations, no matter of the scale or size of those efforts, for making better decisions – for creating better enterprises.
Enterprise Design facilitates the holistic co-design of enterprises through three coherent facets: identity, experience and architecture.
Experience Examples
Experience:
- The impact through interactions the enterprise has on people and their lives. [3]
- How various stakeholders (customers, owners, employees) perceive and interact with the organisation and its offerings, and how these interactions influence them.
- Experience covers followin concepts: Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), Employee Experience (EX), Brand Experience and Operational Experience (customers & employees).
- Experience van be modelled with EDGY elements Task, Journey, Channel, Brand and Product.
- Intersections:
- Brand refers to collective image and reputation that an enterprise builds through consistent communication, behavior and customer experience.
- Product refers to offerings that the enterprise produces and offers: Prodcuts or Services. The EDGY Product element can be used for modelling both products and services.
Key elements of architecture in enterprise design context are as follows:
- Task: What people want to achieve and get done [3].
- Journey: The events and activities people experience in their lives [3].
- Channel: The means of communication between people and the enterprise [3].
Customer Perspective
Business design from the customer perspective covers elements as shown in the simplification below. EDGY provides concepts with which it is possible to visualize all that is meaningful in the context of enterprise. The customer perspective can be analysed with EDGY elements Task, Journey and Channel, which open up the important aspects from customer’s point of view. These elements cover the outside-in view of enterprise’s business. The inside-out view is then covered with the customer-facing elements Brand and Product, which are then connected to other elements of the enterprise, Capability, Organisation and Purpose.
A customer has task(s) to do that are served by the products and/or services, which are produced by the capabilities of an organisation. A customer traverses a journey (of several steps), that represents what a customer experiences while doing task(s). The customer becomes aware of products and/or services with the help of the brand of the organisation. The customer contacts the products and/or services via channels.
Customers access journey steps (stages, phases) via channels when they perform their tasks. Tasks are served by the products and/or services (offerings) that require certain capabilities from the organisation.
Business value is created based on customer value, which occurs when the customer benefits from the products or services of the enterprise. So focusing on customer experience an enterprise can gain success in business.
A capability comprises all that belongs together: everything required to produce certain outputs in the form of offerings, such as products and/or services.
Customer-Centricity as a Business Strategy
Customer-centricity (or customer-centrism) is an approach where the customer is put at the center of all designs and decisions when delivering products, services and experiences to create customer satisfaction and build long-term relationships.
Customer-first is a business strategy, where the customer is at the core of the business.
Designers and design teams in the organization must stay in touch with what’s happening in the customer’s life. It is important for designers to develop awareness and understanding of the journeys customers are going through and the tasks they are trying to accomplish. All change activities within the enterprise must be subordinate to creating the best possible customer experience.
A customer-centric approach can be supported by the Facet Model by asking the right questions to prioritize designing the enterprise around customer-centrism. The ultimate goal is to provide well-designed products and services to deliver the best possible experience. This can be achieved by gaining customer insights, supported by the Facet Model and related tools, methods, and techniques.
Customer-centric Business Strategy: The customer is at the center of all designs and decisions when delivering products, services, and experiences to create customer satisfaction.
Customer Transformation
The customer transformation concept refers to the approach introducing new and imporving existing customer focused processes in an enterprise. It take advantages of data analytics to better understnd customer behavior. It also leverages on implementing digital transformation intitiatives to create more personalised and seamless customer experiences across different channels.
Customer-Focused Business Design
Customer-focused business design is putting the customer first. Taking the customer-focused perspective, we can switch the Facet Model into the position, where the experience is on the top. This underlines the customer-oriented and customer-driven approach in the overall design. The Facet Model can be used in any position according to what is appropriate depending on the specific case.
Focusing on the customer, we can look at the enterprise from the customer’s point of view. Then it is important to get an understanding of what is happening in the customer’s life. What are the tasks a customer wants to achieve, and what are the jobs to be done that he/she needs to do? Answers to these questions we get by gathering information of customers’ lives. This customer insight is crucial information that can be used when designing products and services for the customer’s benefit. Customer insight clarifies what customer experiences and behaves, and what are the actual needs behind desires.
Customer-focused business design is putting the customer first.
Customer Insight, can be obtained by seeing and harvested by observing and watching and by asking and then analysing. A good practice for asking what a customer needs and how he/she behaves is to make a survey. For example, by survey, we can ask customers what the tasks are they value the most. With surveys, the enterprise gets lots of data for further analysis. With the analysed data it is easier to make a difference between real needs and desires. What customer really needs and what he/she wants, should be be distinguished from each other. Data analytics *) is an important part of service design, with which it is possible to analyse the harvested customer-related data. In EDGY the customer needs are represented with Task elements.
Customer Journey is the path of activities during which the customer is completing tasks. Customer Journey Mapping is an important tool for matching customer’s tasks to the enterprise’s products and services. This includes the touchpoints and channels, with which the customers are interacting with the enterprise.
Customer Tasks are specific actions or activities the customer wants to complete. Outcomes that a customer wants to achieve. Analogous to jobs to be done (JTBD) focusing on the task or objective the customer wants to accomplish. Generally, a task refers to what a customer is engaged in during their journey while interacting with a service or product. Tasks represent the customer needs.
Needs and desires: Value Demand. There are always both functional needs and emotional desires. Both impact the experiences of a customer. Functional needs can be fulfilled by the right products and services. Emotional desires can be satisfied by quality when interacting with customers. As the emotions **) of people are subjective, they are difficult to be altered.
Good quality in services means good customer experience as a response to the value demand ***).
*) Data Analytics is a capability, that consists of specialized skills and competences, and specific tools and techniques such as Data science, machine-learning and AI. Data Analytics capability includes specific processes and assets (applications and data), provides certain products & services, that are performed and provided by particular organisation structure(s).
**) Emotions are hard to get. Emotions of people are as slippery as the organisation culture. Both are somewhat emergent by their nature. They are like shadows what we see, but we can’t touch them. Such an intangible things are difficult to design, compared to many other concrete tangible objects or activities that can be defined in detail. Emotions or culture cannot be directly altered or changed, but they can be indirectly affected by the design efforts. A dilemma is: a single product or service can cause thousands of emotions. So, there is this ‘circular reasoning’: experience is experience. Subjective experience refers to the emotional and cognitive impact of a human experience. However, with well-designed products and services an enterprise can produce good customer experience. Products and services can be well-designed by co-design, and supported by combination of customer insight and business insight.
***) Value Demand refers to needs that trigger a Value Stream. There can be two kinds of value streams: 1) Operational Value Streams and 2) Development Value Streams. The former is customer-facing and relates to business operations of the enterprise. The latter is related for change activities of the enterprise, those of which are typically performed according to agile methods and tools such as Scrum, Kanban and SAFe, and can be organized according e.g. to ITIL4 and/or reference architectures such as IT4IT. Value streams of all kinds typically utilize Lean practices.
Customer Experience is a result of many things: interactions with service providers and employees. The most important factor for the experience is the outcome that the customer gets at the end of the customer journey. The outcome can be either beneficial and valuable, or it can be disappointing. Good customer experience is what an enterprise pursues, as good customer experience creates customer value that creates business value. Poor customer experience *) is what should be avoided, as it can cause unwanted consequences for the business and the brand. Getting feedback from customers is important for analysing what can be done even better.
*) Failure Demand is a remarkable reason for poor customer experience. That occurs when customer experiences poor quality, poor service, unnecessary interactions, unfriendliness, little or no attention, gets incomplete or wrong products or information.
Taking the customer perspective, we can utilize the Facet Model as shown in the figure below. Starting from the customer point of view, by following the relations between the enterprise elements, we can find the most relevant aspects of the business that affect the customer experience:
- Customer has Task(s) to do, that he/she experiences via Channel(s) during the Journey.
- Customer Journey is influenced by the Brand of the enterprise.
- Customer uses the Products / Services provided by the enterprise Capabilities.
- Processes and Assets of the enterprise realise capabilities.
- Processes are performed by the Organisation,
- Organisation has goals, mission, value propositions etc. with a story and content, which altogether constitute the Purpose of the enterprise.
- The purpose of the enterprise is made visible by the Brand.
- Brand influences the customer to use the Products and/or Services of the enterprise…
The customer experience is made up of all this. Everything that a customer experiences while traversing through the journey is affecting to the emotions and feelings of the customer.
As the emotions of people are subjective, they are difficult to be altered or interfered with by anything or anybody else. However, when a customer is interacting with the enterprise, there is much that can be done to provide the best possible quality in products and services.
Getting customer insight into the customer’s life is the predominant prerequisite for all the design efforts. With customer insight, it is possible to get information about the ultimate needs of the customers. By getting the right knowledge of customers’ needs, the enterprise can focus on the right products and services at the right time, and provide the best possible customer experience.
Good customer experience is the result of well-designed products and services.
Customer-Centric Model
A customer-centric model is a business approach that prioritizes the needs, expectations, and satisfaction of the customer in every aspect of an organisation’s operations, from product development to marketing, sales, and service. Instead of focusing solely on products or services or internal processes, a customer-centric organisation places the customer at the center of all decisions and actions, aiming to create value and long-term relationships.
Customer-centrism leads to customer-driven business is that focuses its strategies, products, services, and processes primarily around the needs, wants, and feedback of its customers. In this model, the business adapts and evolves based on customer input and behavior, with the goal of delivering value, fostering customer loyalty, and staying competitive in the market.
- Customer-Centric Business: Proactive, holistic, and long-term relationship-focused.
- Customer-Driven Business: Reactive, adaptive, and focused on immediate customer feedback and demands.
Both approaches aim to put the customer first and improve customer experience (satisfaction). They both emphasize the importance of listening to customers and delivering value based on their needs and preferences.
Many customer-centric businesses are succesful, as they consistently focus on customer satisfaction and innovation driven by user feedback. By embracing a customer-centric model, businesses not only improve their customer relations but also drive sustainable growth and long-term success.
Customer Engagement Model
Customer-centric business model, Customer Engagement Model, enhances the traditional business model concept by focusing on customer *). Whereas the business model refers to the way in which an enterprise creates value for its stakeholders, the customer engagement model encompasses all the aspects and various elements with which an enterprise creates value to its customers via offerings (products and/or services). And when creating customer value with the offerings, the enterprise generates also business value. So the fundamental pardigm shift is related to the focus switching from organisation to customer. From inside-out thinking to outside-in thinking.
*) Hänti, Sirpa, Asiakkaista ansaintaan – Asiakaskeskeinen liiketoimintamalli, Alma Talent 2021.
The customer-centrism is a stratigic choice taken by the enterprise, which puts the customer as a focal entity in all the business decisions, as well as in the operational business. Consequently, this customer engagement model forces to customer-driven design & development, where the customer needs are the basis for all the change intiatives and activities in the enterprise. The basic principle is “customer first”, from which all the other principles are derived and subordinated from. Principels are as shown in the figure below.
Customer Insight and Business Insight: 1 + 1 > 2.
Think Big. Customer insight serves better the enterprise when used in conjunction with business insight – and business foresight. The most comprehensive insight can be accomplished when using these in-depth areas of knowledge together as a combined approach. This can be achieved by using the Facet Model, as its facets cover all the relevant aspects and all that is meaningful in the context of enterprises: people and their needs, existential purpose and story of promises, and operational abilities to deliver on promises.
Start Small. Take the most familiar perspective as a catalyst and then extend that with elements of other perspectives. Use the Facet Model as a map. Navigate to other territories with a curious and open mind. Take the changes *). Think differently. Change perspective. Discuss and learn with others. Calibrate your tools and methods with other disciplines. Discoveries and opportunities will soon appear.
*) Take the changes. ”Chance Favors The Prepared Mind”. When you are curious and open to new ideas, when you appreciate different professions and their opinions, when you are ready to change your perspective and perception, then you can learn and find new things and get better in what you do.
Take the holistic view. The fact is that there is this only enterprise that we have, so why not design it all together in a holistic way? It is just reasonable to create a shared understanding of the entire enterprise, and not just an aspect of it. It is unwise to observe and develop the enterprise within separate practices. It is not the most optimal way to do things within many distinct groups of people with the ways of their own. Those various disciplines produce inconsistent, somewhat overlapping, and slightly contractionary outputs and outcomes. This causes unnecessary misconceptions and ineffectiveness on a large scale. Instead, utilise the enterprise design approach with the Facet Model and take the holistic view. Take into account all the aspects and factors at once, so that nothing has to be added to the picture afterward.
Co-design. Take the holistic view by co-designing. Experience matters and Services are not exclusive areas of Service Designers only. Respectively, architecture is not the property of architects only, not mention IT. Instead, both experience and architecture are subjects that have synergy, so they’d better be done together, in combination.
Produce a coherent, holistic single source of truth in co-design with the help of the Facet Model.
Customer View and Organisation View
When customer meets the organisation, it is the moment of truth for the enterprise: customer needs should be fulfilled with the offerings, the products and/or services. This is the “normal, healthy” value demand that arises from the customer needs (tasks, jobs-to-be-done).
Customer gets information about the offerings the organisation by the brand communication.
EDGY helps to take the holistic view of an enterprise by combining experience, identity and architecture perspectives, which is a practical approach to take into account both the customer and organisation viewpoints at the same time.
Business-related design challenges can be analysed e.g. a) from the customer view or b) from the organisation view.
- Customer has task(s) to do,
- which are supported and served by the products and/or services,
- that are produced by the capabilities
- of the organisation,
- that have a purpose
- which is manifested by the brand
- to the customers.
Customer Tasks
Customer-oriented design can be started by analysing the customer needs a.k.a. tasks. Tasks are whatever a customer wants to do. Tasks are the customer’s ‘jobs to be done’. Tasks can be e.g. functional or emotional, they can be high-level and long-term tasks, or low-level and short-term tasks.
Tasks can be harvested e.g. with surveys, or just observing and interviewing the customers. When the tasks are harvested, they can be grouped for further analysis. When visualized, top tasks can be color-coded so that they can be easily recognized. Top tasks are the most important tasks for the customers, from which they gain the most benefit. From the enterprise’s point of view, top tasks are the tasks to which to focus and put effort – for to enable the best possible customer experience.
Tasks are what people want to achieve and get done. [3]
Top Tasks
According to the book Top Tasks by Gerry McGovern, a basic pattern can be identified when analysing tasks that customers want to accomplish. Tasks can be distinguished between top and tiny tasks based on their customer importance.
Top task survey – Asking customers what they want with a survey. If we ask customers by survey what tasks they value the most important to get done, there is a pattern that can be observed. According to that, there can be found four (4) categories of tasks, 25% of the votes each:
- Top Tasks (25%), few tasks of them all (e.g. 2-3) really matter to customers,
- Important Tasks (25%), a small amount of all tasks (e.g. 5-10), that are meaningful to customers, they appreciate getting them done
- Medium Tasks (25%), quite meaningful and important, but not highly prioritized by customers
- Tiny Tasks (25%), there are plenty of small tasks, not as meaningful to customers as to enterprise.
These are typical answers from customers when they value a given list of tasks.
- Top tasks are the most important, primary, top priority long-term tasks, the ’must’ tasks, from which customers get the most benefit, jobs that they want to get done. Top tasks affect the most customer experience and customer satisfaction. Finding these top tasks, focusing, designing and investing in them, the enterprise advantages the most.
- Medium tasks are important, and highly valued by the customers, but not the absolute necessary jobs to get done. Customers appreciate them and they are meaningful, but not the highest priority tasks.
- Small tasks are special tasks, quite meaningful but may not be necessary, perhaps nice to get done alongside the top or important tasks.
- Tiny tasks are small low-level tasks, that are not so important to customers as they are for certain people inside the enterprise.
Customer Journey
Customer journeys are focal points of customer-centric enterprises. A customer journey is a specialisation of a journey, which expresses what people go through in their lives: what a person feels, does or experiences over time. A journey represents a ‘slice of life’. It is a chronological and simplified representation of complex experiences. [4]
A customer journey is an end-to-end process that a customer is going through while accomplishing some task(s). A customer journey represents a coherent whole from the customer perspective in a certain context. It is a completeness that is meaningful to examine as a coherent whole.
A customer journey is the comprehensive experience a customer has while interacting with an enterprise across all touchpoints, channels, and stages of engagement. It encompasses both frontstage interactions (what the customer sees) and backstage processes (internal processes and applications that support the experience).
A journey consists of events and activities people experience in their lives. [3]
Journey Steps. A customer journey consists of a series of activities, journey steps, that a customer is taking when accomplishing certain task(s). Those journey steps represent events and activities a customer experiences and does during the journey. With journey steps, it is possible to make visible what a customer feels, does or experiences when trying to accomplish a task.
Customer Experience. The definite customer experience is an aggregation, combined influence, of all the journey steps of the customer journey. In addition, the customer experience is influenced, not only by moments in the customer journey, but also by the brand of the enterprise, and all the contacts and interactions with the enterprise, as well as all the marketing and media content that reach the customer. Customer experience can be divided into the following hierarchical levels: 1) functional, 2) emotional and 3) purposes.
Customer Value refers to the perceived benefit or worth that a customer derives from the enterprise’s products or services. By focusing on the customer, adopting a customer-centric approach, and encouraging customer-driven design and development, an enterprise prioritises customer value according to the customer-first principle.
Touchpoints. The journey steps can consist of touchpoints, service moments, with the enterprise. These touchpoints can be associated with channels, which represent the interactions with the products and/or services provided by the enterprise.
Tasks. The purpose of a customer journey is to accomplish some task(s). There can be an ultimate task that a customer wants to achieve, and several sub-tasks on the intermediate steps of the journey. Serving those tasks makes the customer journey interesting from the enterprise’s point of view. The tasks represent the needs of a customer. The enterprise tries to fulfill the customer’s needs by providing services and/or products.
A Customer Journey is the end-to-end path a customer takes when interacting with an enterprise’s services.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the end-to-end journey that a customer experiences when interacting with a product(s) or service(s) of an enterprise. It outlines the customer’s interactions across various touchpoints, channels, and stages, capturing their emotions, pain points, and expectations at each step.
Customer journey mapping serves as a bridge between the customer-centric perspective and the enterprise’s internal operations, structures, and technological systems. By fostering a deeper connection between customer needs and enterprise operations, customer journey mapping becomes an essential tool for improving customer satisfaction and long-term business success. In practice, customer journey mapping involves creating a visual representation (often a flowchart, diagram, or map) of the customer journey, highlighting key touchpoints, emotions, pain points, and backstage processes that influence the experience. On the journey, and for the tasks, customers use products and/or services provided by the enterprise. Products and/or services are “what an enterprise makes, offers and delivers for people’s benefit.” A customer journey visualisation can be enriched with the services and/or products that are serving the tasks as shown in the figure below.
On the journey and for the tasks customers use products and/or services provided by the enterprise. Products and/or services are “what an enterprise makes, offers and delivers for people’s benefit.” A customer journey visualisation can be enriched with the services and/or products that are serving the tasks as shown in the figure below.
Customer Journey Mapping is the process of visually outlining a customer’s interactions with a business to understand and improve their overall experience.
Customer Journey Map
Mapping is matching. Matching parts together. Like matching actors to roles, people to profiles (skills & competencies), or tasks to products. This view can be used for positioning customer tasks (a.k.a. customer needs) in line with products and/or services the enterprise offers. With this analysis, it is possible to find opportunities for possible new products/services.
An example customer journey mapping shown below.
Customer Journey Analysis
The customer journey can be analysed in more detail by identifying all the tasks associated with each step of the journey. In this approach, tasks are identified and visualised from the bottom up, while the journey is read from left to right.
Customer Journey Management (CJM)
Customer Journey Management refers to the practice of strategically designing, analyzing, and optimizing and managing the end-to-end journey that a customer experiences with an enterprise’s products, services, or brand.
It ensures that customers have seamless, meaningful, and value-driven interactions across all touchpoints during their lifecycle with the organization. Customer Journey Management is a customer-centric, end-to-end approach that utilizes visualization and data-driven optimization. It is collaborative by default and fosters cross-functional cooperation by addressing both the customer perspective and intra-organizational aspects.
Customer Journey Management is closely related to concept of Customer Journey Operations (Customer Journey Ops) as both focus on enhancing the customer experience across their interactions with the enterprise.
Customer Journey Operations (CJO) focuses on the operational and executional side of the journey, ensuring processes, tools, and teams are aligned to deliver the designed journey effectively. It ensures that designed improvements are implemented and monitored.
Customer Journey Management (CJM) focuses on designing and mapping the customer journey, identifying touchpoints, and optimizing the experience from a strategic perspective.
Customer Journey Management is customer-centric, end-to-end focused approach.
Customer Journey Management design steps:
- Get Customer Insight – to Understand the Customer
- Perform customer research (surveys, interviews, analytics) to gain deep insights into customer needs, behaviors, and pain points.
- Create customer personas to represent different segments and their unique requirements.
- Map the Customer Journey
- Identify key touchpoints where customers interact with the enterprise (e.g., website, support, physical store).
- Map the end-to-end journey from awareness to feedback (pre-service-, service- and post-service periods), visualizing each step and identifying gaps or inefficiencies.
- Define Goals and Metrics
- Set measurable goals for customer experience improvements.
- Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring the success of the customer journey.
- Design the Ideal Journey
- Create a future-state journey map
- Address pain points and enhances the overall experience, including personalization.
- Leverage Technology and Data-driven Decisions
- Use journey analytics tools to manage, track, and analyze customer interactions.
- Ensure data from all touchpoints is integrated into a single view for better decision-making.
- Engage Stakeholders
- Align teams (e.g. customer service, IT, support) to ensure a unified focus on customer-centric goals.
- Communicate the benefits of journey management and secure buy-in from leadership and employees.
- Iterate and Optimize
- Continuously monitor customer feedback and analytics to identify areas for improvement.
Update journey maps and processes to adapt to changing customer needs and environment conditions.
Service Blueprint
The Service Blueprint defines the customer journey, detailing the customer’s activities alongside the services, products, and activities of the enterprise. It enables the analysis of the entire stack, from the customer’s perspective to the organizational perspective. The Service Blueprint provides a holistic, human-centric, and collaborative view of a service, integrating both customer and organizational perspectives. A simple basic structure is shown below.
A Service Blueprint is a detailed visual map that outlines a service’s processes, touchpoints, and interactions from both the customer and organisational perspectives.
The service blueprint is one of the most comprehensive customer-driven visualisations. There are many variations of them. The main idea is to show what is the customer doing while trying to accomplish task(s), and how is he/she served by the enterprise. As such, a service blueprint combines a) customer experience in the form of the journey with b) the task(s) to be accomplished, c) the products and/or services, provided by the enterprise, and d) the back-office processes and e) supporting applications.
Extended structure with layers shown below.
A service blueprint is based on a customer journey that is a ‘timeline’ of customer experiences. The customer journey of a service blueprint can be divided into periods as follows: 1) Pre-Service Period, 2) Service Period and 3) Post-Service Period.
This simple division into phases makes the overall service blueprint easier to understand and design. This helps understanding a) what are the customer actions and needs before the decision to get into the service, b) what are the main needs within the service, and c) what is important for the customer aftter the service.
A service blueprint is visualised as a layered structure, where the customer actions and needs are introduced on top layers, and organisation’s actions are introduced on the bottom layers. The service layer is visualised in between the customer and organisation activities. Note! There is no typical or ‘standard’ service blueprint with commonly agreed terminology and visualization. Instead, there are many variations of it, some of which are shown here.
Note! There is no typical or ‘standard’ service blueprint with commonly agreed terminology and visualization. Instead, there are many variations of it, some of which are shown here.
Service Blueprint examples below.
Using a service blueprint as a tool for service design and business architecture collaboration offers several key advantages, as it bridges customer experiences with internal operations, processes, and applications. It creates a shared understanding, highlights areas for improvement, and ensures that services are both customer-centric and operationally effective. This fosters better collaboration, more informed decisions, and a stronger alignment between customer needs and business goals.
The service blueprint is an essential tool for bridging the gap between service design and business architecture.
Organisation structures can be added to the service blueprint diagram (as swimlines) as shown below.
Service Blueprints can be used to define customer activities in contrast to the company’s activities, and to map customer needs (tasks) against the products and/or services provided by the company. Additionally, they make visible what happens behind the scenes of these products and/or services: the back-end processes, the parts of the organization involved, and the supporting applications.
Capabilities can be used as higher-level back-stage elements. Whether to use process or capability elements in the backstage depends on the level of abstraction, which in turn depends on the specific case and what is appropriate for the purpose.
Service Blueprint can contain an extra top layer (green) for defining high-level business story such as value propositions.
Benefits of using a Service Blueprint in co-design and collaboration with customers, service designers, and business architects:
An example of the Service Blueprint elements is introduced below.
Service Blueprint elements are introduced in the table below.
The elements to be used depend on the case and what is appropriate to fit the purpose.
Service Blueprint can be specified with 1) pre-service- , 2) service- and 3) post-service periods as shown below.
Channels
Channels play an important role in serving the customers. Channels are the contact mechanisms via which the customers interact with the services of the enterprise. Channels serve as the delivery mechanism for touchpoints in the customer journey and play a critical role in bridging the gap between the enterprise and its external environment.
There can be several types channels e.g. as follows: 1) digital channels (websites, mobile apps, e-commerce platforms), 2) physical channels (retail stores, point-of-sales, service centers, delivery points), 3) human-interaction channels (call-centers, customer support), 4) third-party channels (resellers, distributors, marketplaces such as Amazon) and 5) hybrid channels (omnichannels).
In enterprise design, channels are the essential conduits for delivering experiences, value, and interactions to customers and stakeholders. Designing channels strategically ensures they align with the enterprise’s goals, support seamless customer journeys, and provide value to both the customer and the enterprise. Channels can be visualized on a map and then introduced in more detail e.g. in a table.
Channels (as any other elements) can be listed in the table format, based on which the visualisation can be done easily.
Channels are the means people use to engage and interact with us. [3]
Touchpoints
In the enterprise design context, channels provide the framework for delivering enterprise value, while touchpoints are the specific moments where customers interact with that value.
A touchpoint is a moment of interaction between an enterprise and people. Touchpoints can be modelled using the enterprise element journey to represent moments over time, or channel to represent the means of interaction [3]
Touchpoints and channels must be designed together to ensure a seamless, human-centric, and cohesive customer experience across the entire enterprise ecosystem.
- Touchpoints are the specific “what” of customer interactions.
- Channels are the broader “where” and “how” those interactions happen.
Touchpoints can be modelled with the EDGY Journey element.
Channels can be modelled with the EDGY Channel element.
Touchpoints:
- Specific moments of interaction between a customer and the enterprise.
- Focused on what happens during an engagement.
- Example: Browsing a product, asking for support, or completing a purchase.
- Represents the steps or events in the customer journey.
Channels:
- The mediums or platforms through which the interactions (touchpoints) occur.
- Focused on where the interaction takes place.
- Example: Website, mobile app, physical store, or call center.
- Represent the pathways that connect and enable touchpoints throughout the journey.
Comparing channels and touchpoints in the context of customer journey.
Product and Service Offerings
The offerings of an enterprise are designed to deliver value that meets customer needs, supports strategic goals. The offerings of an enterprise are the products, services, and value propositions it provides to meet customer needs, solve problems, or create benefits. These offerings form the core of what the enterprise delivers to its customers, partners, and stakeholders.
The offerings can be modelled with the EDGY Product element.
Offerings encompass all value components within an umbrella concept, enabling enterprises to adopt a customer-centric view of their value proposition.
Offerings can be categorized as follows:
1. Products: Physical Products:
- Tangible goods such as electronics, machinery, or consumer goods.
- Digital Products: Software, apps, or digital platforms.
- Customized Products: Tailored solutions to meet specific customer requirements.
2. Services Professional Services:
- Professional Services: Consulting, assistance, training, or other expertise-driven offerings.
- Subscription or Managed Services: Ongoing services like cloud storage, maintenance, or content subscriptions.
The emotional and functional outcomes customers derive from interacting with the enterprise (e.g. a seamless user experience).
Enterprise offerings can be made visible within the Product/Service Map. It consists of products and/or services organized into hierarchies.
Products and services can be described in a table (example below) together with the map diagram.
When identified, products and/or services can be used to map customers’ needs (Tasks) to the enterprise’s offerings, e.g. in service blueprints. Then it is possible to analyse do we already have the right products and/or services to help customers accomplish their tasks, or whether should we design new or better products and/or services.
Products and/or services can be visualized in a map with metrics of certain criteria, such as customer satisfaction results as shown the figure below.
What are Offerings in the Enterprise context? Why use “Offerings” as an umbrella concept?
- Offerings, as an umbrella concept, unify products, services, and other value components under a single term. This perspective allows enterprises to design and deliver comprehensive, integrated solutions that align with customer needs and expectations in a holistic, adaptable way.
- In the enterprise context, offerings refer to the value propositions that an enterprise provides to its customers, stakeholders, or partners. These offerings encompass everything an enterprise delivers to satisfy customer needs, solve problems, or create benefits. They serve as the foundation of an enterprise’s value creation and delivery. They include all the tangible and intangible elements that contribute to the value provided by the enterprise.
- By grouping products, services, and other value elements under the term “offerings,” enterprises can take a customer-centric view of their value proposition.
- Modern enterprises often blur the line between products and services (e.g., product-as-a-service models), making “offerings” a more versatile and inclusive term.
- Referring to offerings allows enterprises to align their resources and capabilities with what they deliver, rather than focusing on isolated outputs.
- As enterprises expand into new areas (e.g., digital services, experiences, or ecosystems), “offerings” accommodates new forms of value without limiting the scope.
Offerings vs. Products and Services
Offerings, as an umbrella concept, unify products, services, and other value components under a single term.
Product and/or Service
A product and/or service is what we make, offer and deliver for people’s benefit [3]. As such, a product and/or service is what an enterprise (or some of its part) provides to its customers.
When modelling an enterprise’s behavior and structure either from the customer perspective or from the organisation perspective, we can use the EDGY Product element for depicting what is delivered to customers.
EDGY is a simple language, and the same element can be used for these purposes: to represent both tangible products and intangible services. However, there are differences between a product and a service. When a product is provided, the ownership is changed for e.g. money. When a service is provided, it is done within the interaction of the customer and the service provider. Some characteristics and differences between products and services are introduced in the table below.
Product and/or Service is what an enterprise makes, offers and delivers for people’s benefit.
Service Design
Service Design is a human-centric approach that focuses on services. The main focus is on the customer that uses the services (or products) of the enterprise. It can be said that a service comes alive when there is a customer that uses it. In addition, the customer, there are typically people from the enterprise, the employees, that provide the service. As such a service is an interaction between the customer and the employees.
Interaction between the customer and the service provider is crucial in services.
Service (and product) is what the enterprise makes and provides to customers. Services appear in people’s lives, as they go on their journeys when doing their tasks. Services are realized (delivered) by the operations (business architecture) of the enterprise. Services are what the customers can use when doing their tasks. Services are what an enterprise provides for people’s benefit.
Organisation. Behind every service, there is an organisation that produces the service. Depending on the business area, there are pure service organisations, and some product-oriented organisations. Quite typically there exists both products and services in the offerings of an anterprise. A typical service organisation (such as a consultancy firm) provides specialist services.
Offerings (products / services) are produced by an organisation.
Services are what the enterprise makes and provides to customers’ benefit.
Behind every service, there is an organisation that produces the service.
Service scene. According to theater analogy, customers see what is on the stage, the front stage. Customers can’t see what happens on the backstage, where are the supporting processes, people and assets with which the enterprise performs its services.
All the design should be driven by the goals. From the strategic goals at high-level, and from the operational business goals at detailed level.
Service Design starts from the customer perspective. The “wireframe model” figure below illustrates how a customer is informed by the brand what products or services can be used for performing the tasks.
Enterprise Design approach is human-centric as shown in the figure below.
Service design covers the majority of enterprise elements as shown below. There is an infinite loop of dependencies between elements, “as everything affects everything else”.
Service Design aspects: focus on front stage, but covers also the back stage.
Use Case and User Story – revisited
Use cases and user stories are both techniques used in software development and systems design to capture and describe functional requirements from the perspective of end users. Use Case is an earlier technique, and User Story came popular in the age of agile methods.
Use cases are indeed an earlier technique, originating in the 1980s and 1990s as part of more structured, traditional software development approaches like UML (Unified Modeling Language). They provide detailed scenarios that describe how a user interacts with a system (an application) to achieve a goal.
User stories, on the other hand, gained popularity with the rise of agile methodologies, particularly after the early 2000s. They are simpler and more flexible than use cases, designed to encourage collaboration and iterative development. Agile teams use user stories to capture short, high-level descriptions of features or functions from the user’s perspective.
Both focuses on the user as a doer, typically against a system (an application) which is under construction. So they are both focused on system development. End users can be considered as customers of the system. Therefore we can take the customer perspective and think that the use cases or user stories are tasks of a customer. Accordingly, as shown below, we can model the use cases or user stories with the EDGY.
With EDGY it is possible to illustrate user tasks when using an application as shown below. Tasks are customer or end user needs, jobs they want to get done. Those can represent the use cases as user’s functional requirements towards an application are close to the tasks that a user wants to get done with the application.
EDGY Task elements represent both use cases and user stories, modeled with a simple, easy, and visually elegant graphical notation. The description of a Task should be kept short and compact, simply defining what the user wants to accomplish.
The EDGY Task element is by definition: “What people want to achieve and get done.” [3]
EDGY elements People, Task, and Asset can be used for modeling a whole sentence in simple terms that explains both use cases and user stories in a visual format, as shown in the figure above. This reflects how EDGY elements can visually represent key components of both use cases and user stories, breaking them down into roles (People), actions (Task), and tools or systems involved (Application), to create an easy-to-understand visual representation of functional requirements.
In addition, we can formulate more detailed sentences with the EDGY base elements whenever appropriate as shown below.
An Use Case is typically defined in structured document e.g. as follows:
- Name of the Use Case, ID, Description
- Actor, who is the user, what is the role of the user
- Precondition(s)
- Steps (main course, happy day scenario)
- Postcondition(s)
- Alternative steps
- Exceptions
An User Strory is typically defined as a sentence as follows:
- “As a <role>, I want to <action>, so that <outcome>”
An example:
- As an author of an article I want to publish my data set, so that it can be found and cited by other researchers”
Customer Segment Map
Customer segments (or personas) can be identified and introduced in a customer segment map. This is a segmented representation that can be added with certain semantics: sizes of pies, and extra markings of certain criteria (such as importance, volume, costs etc.) with tags and metrics.
Stakeholder Map
A stakeholder map (a.k.a. People Map) can be defined e.g. for the enterprise, or some of its parts, such as for business area or product-/service area.
A typical stakeholder map consists of circles (like an onion), starting from the ‘core’ (inner circle), and then introducing other levels of stakeholders in other circles.
Identified stakeholders can be placed into a stakeholder map that can be visualized a) from the customer perspective or b) from the organisation perspective. The former is focused on the customer and the latter is focused on the target organisation.
The customer perspective puts the customer in the middle, and other stakeholders into circles depending on their visibility from the customer’s point of view.
The organisation perspective is taken from the target organisation point of view. The target organisation is performing certain behavior and producing products and/or services with partners to customers.
EDGY tools
The Enterprise Design language, EDGY, from the Intersection Group, enables people to design well-designed outcomes for better enterprises!
EDGY diagrams can be created with several tools, such as:
- Draw.io (available as Confluence plugin, which enables lots of features for combining diagrams, text and tables)
- Draw.io net (web browser based tool, Windows, Mac)
- Draw.io desktop client
- Miro
- QualiWare
- BlueDolphin
- Powerpoint (stencils from EDGY tools)
More to come.
EDGY stencils (+ lots of information) can be found on the Intersection Group’s Enterprise Design with EDGY pages:
- Enterprise Design with EDGY
- EDGY Tools (stencils for Draw.io, PowerPoint etc.)
- E.g. for Draw.io, just drop stencils XML-file to Draw.io user interface, and you will see this on the tool palette:
References
[1] Intersection Group pages, https://intersection.group
[2] Enterprise Design with EDGY pages, https://enterprise.design/
[3] EDGY language foundations, book, 2023, (available as pdf), link
[4] EDGY 23 Language Foundations, Online course (4 weeks), Milan Guenther & Wolfgang Goebl, link
[5] Enterprise Design Patterns, Intersection Group book, 2020, (available as pdf), link
[6] EDGY 23 product release, launch on 29th March 2023, webinar recording, Milan Guenther & Wolfgang Goebl, link
— Eero Hosiaisluoma