Verbal abuse floods call centers

Call center employees have in the past had to cope with verbal and sexual harassment from abusive customers. Now, the latter will face criminal punishment.

The unsavory experiences of people dealing with customers and clients by telephone have been revealed by the financial companies that hire them, prompting law enforcement authorities to act.

A woman who handles telephone calls for a bank recalled being contacted by a man who suddenly began to moan after asking about mortgages for a minute and told her he was masturbating.

According to the bank, she recalled her mind went blank after the exchange and she was in a state of shock that lasted for several minutes.

Other men will call different receptionists at the same call center asking each of them to have sex, some even offering to pay them. Then there are others who keep the sex talk at bay, but hurl insults and threats instead.

Most of the 35,000-plus employees at the call centers of banks, and credit card and insurance companies are women in their 20s and 30s, who have been vulnerable to verbal abuse from the anonymous people they come into contact with. Most of them are outsourced workers whose temporary employment status makes them less likely to report the abuse they take from customers.

While call center employees are believed to have reported more than 100 cases of sexual harassment from customers last year, up from 56 cases in 2011 and 29 in 2009, it seems certain that the majority of these inappropriate interactions go unreported.

Reporting didn’t do much for the victims anyway. There were less than 10 cases in the past four years where financial companies took legal action against misbehaving customers.

“There were some instances where a call center employee would hang up after hearing what she didn’t need to hear and that customer would call back to the company to complain that the call center employee hung up on them,” said an official at the Korean Federation of Banks.

“Call center employees are under enormous stress and most of the abuse they take from customers isn’t reported to their managers. There is a need for a system to protect them from verbal abuse as well as better make the public aware of this problem.”

The financial companies are belatedly taking stronger action to protect their call center employees, pursuing telephone perverts and bullies with criminal charges, but only after being pressured by the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) to do so.

According to guidelines provided by the Korean Federation of Banks, which will be used by commercial banks such as Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, Woori Bank and Hana Bank, a call center employee can warn the customer up to three times for using sexually offensive and other inappropriate language.

It that doesn’t stop the caller, the employee will transfer the call to the company’s automated response system (ARS) service, which will inform the caller not to use the call center next time. If the person still calls back with abusive language, he or she will receive a post at her home warning that the behavior could be dealt with by law enforcement authorities. <The Korea Times/Kim Tong-hyung>