In the 1960s, Private Automated Business Exchanges started to emerge. Today we refer to these as call centers. With this new technology, we see the birth of centers and phone numbers that exist only to answer and resolve customers’ questions and problems. In a way, we can also consider these to be the first step towards the customer service departments.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.