I think it’s more likely that most of the call centre staff were reasonable people who followed the process they were trained to do, but the process is broken.

I think it’s more likely that most of the call centre staff were reasonable people who followed the process they were trained to do, but the process is broken. Some of them may have known it was broken, but either not known how to work around that, or faced barriers to doing so such as having to talk to an a-hole boss about it.