Making people follow scripts is merely a bad practice insisted upon by misinformed or stupid management.
If it's limited to traditional customer service roles (which aren't allowed to deviate from a script), I honestly don't understand how this would be any more unethical or creepy than it already was to begin with. The experience is a lot like interacting with an LLM chatbot today, except somehow even more creepy because you know it's a human behind the phone.
I don't really have a stake in this because I know customer service is going in the shitter either way. But I do find it interesting how people perceive the progression.
I had to get on the phone with Walgreens the other day and got stuck in a phone tree loop of “sorry, I didn’t get that” with no option to bail out and talk to a real person.
I've never tried calling, but I've regularly emailed companies, and this always works.
https://investor.walgreensbootsalliance.com/investor-resourc...
Also. There is no rule that customer service must follow a script. Some poorly run companies follow this awful practice and it is extremely harmful to the customer experience and a gent engagement / work satisfaction. It's the result of incompetent management.
of course, both actually are clearly unethical if they don't appear to be representing corporate interests, but I haven't run into this issue outside of robocalls (which are, I believe, illegal already).