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A timeline of services

1840s: letters

Services first started to be accessible remotely through direct correspondence to the service provider.

1920s: forms

These letters of request started to become codified into ‘forms’ to improve the speed and accuracy of people responding to requests.

1960s: forms + support

With the first call centres becoming popular means of supporting customers, remote support started to be added to larger services, such as insurance and banking.

1970s: process + forms + support

With the introduction of computerised processes, the 1970s heralded a new way of seeing a service. No longer a set of instructions given to staff, computers started to make some decisions about our services for us. Making sure that records were accessible to staff meant having account numbers and an increasing number of unique IDs to identify users.

1980s: process + forms + customer service

The 1980s saw a rapid expansion of consultancies and methodologies to deal with the numbers of services now operating with remote support. The term ‘customer experience’ was first used to describe the growing need to make sense of the complexity of modern services. These were still mostly manual input, and the ‘form’ still dominated as the main means of interaction.