Tag: Script

Is the TSA using scripts to push us through its full body scanners?

By Christopher Elliott |

Elnavigante/Shutterstock
Elnavigante/Shutterstock
Roberta Ling is a 73-year-old woman from Austin, Texas. Statistically, she’s likelier to be the next Miss America than a terrorist. But that doesn’t stop the TSA from harassing her whenever she flies.

Ling expects it. She has an artificial breast prosthesis, and is forced to make a difficult choice between a full-body scan and an uncomfortable pat-down when she’s screened. (Disclosure: I am opposed to the TSA’s current screening methods, and believe the choice between a scan and pat-down violates our Fourth Amendment rights.)

What Ling doesn’t expect is the hard sell on the scanner, which has sounded strangely similar lately.
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Are you being fed a line? 5 secrets for breaking through the script

By Christopher Elliott |

Marcinski/Shutterstock
Marcinski/Shutterstock
Talk to me.

That’s all customers like you want when they call a company. They want someone to talk to them.

But corporations don’t always talk back. Last week, I mentioned the second-generation form letters many consumers were getting. Turns out there’s a little more to the story.

For the better part of the last decade, large companies have scripted many of their most common call-center responses. What does that mean? Well basically, when you contact a company with a question, the agent can type in the issue into their computer and receive a “scripted” response that will answer the question. Then they read it back to you.
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