> many of them so tightly constrain what the people say, you might as well be talking to robots I worked for a company (they were the U.S. market leader in the

> many of them so tightly constrain what the people say, you might as well be talking to robots I worked for a company (they were the U.S. market leader in their online communications niche) who took this to an extreme. They outsourced their customer service, and in a misguided effort at quality control scripted every single response a service rep was allowed to say. As in, they were literally prohibited from saying anything that was not a scripted response during a support call. Eventually a rumor circulated that the folks responsible for retention and turnover decided to fight their poor numbers by manipulating the scripts to make it as difficult as possible to cancel service. Don't know for sure if that was true, but there was circumstantial evidence in the (sometimes comical) live chat scripts that infuriated customers posted online.