Service Blueprint as Musical Score

One of my favorite things to do as an experience strategist is creating service blueprints. Recently, I was mapping a service blueprint: customer desire, business owner and product and the technology that helps both in a timeline that starts with "entice" and ends with "exit" and "extend."

I color coded the interactions, one click moving from one line to the next, progressing in its linear, time-bound direction. The customer makes a choice. The tech stack does its magic, and the business owner's inventory is consulted. The item moves to a shopping cart.

As I moved from touchpoint to touchpoint, it started to look familiar. It was a musical score.
So I decided to map one of my musical compositions to a service blueprint.

In the score pictured above, I start with the bassline. On the EchoPlex, I loop an ostinato — triplets, steady, repeating steadily for the entire duration of the song. This is the customer need. Everything else has to sit on top of this. If I get this loop wrong, nothing afterwards will work.

I added the middle voices next. Pizzicato chords that modulate from measure to measure. This is feasibility. This is the technology layer. Not glamorous, not the thing anyone hums on the way home, but the foundation for the melody to build upon. Change one chord and you change the entire feeling of the service, measure to measure.

After eight bars, I play the verse melody live — unlooped, unrecorded, unautomated. This is the human layer of the business. The salesman who can read a room, the customer rep who hears what the customer doesn’t say. Human judgments, no algorithms.

Then the chorus is recorded, overlaid with harmonies, building higher and higher. This is the product offering — and the harmonies are the brand experience, the customer value beyond the basic need.

A lot of organizations design from the top down. They start with what they want the customer to feel and bolt the technology and feasibility on afterward. Like a house whose foundation is faulty, the service feels hollow. The bassline is wrong, or missing.

In the service blueprints I build, I create it like a piece of music. I don’t start with a melody. I start with the need — steady, repeating, non-negotiable. Perhaps other composers start with the melody. I can't, because the loops set the mood for everything that follows. Every layer has to be in tune with the one that starts it. The soprano is the reward for getting the bass right.