'Punching bags again': Bank call center agents brace for angry customers after data breaches

"Here we go again… We’re going to be the punching bags."

A bank call center agent is bracing for an onslaught of customer anger after a string of AI-driven hacks exposed the personal data of tens of thousands of financial customers this month. 

The agents have no say over how the breaches are handled, yet they are the first to bear the brunt of customers’ fury. Some say they are handling three times their usual number of calls.

“Because of the nature of the job, we come to work feeling like there’s nothing we can do about it,” said the agent, who has spent eight years at a subcontractor for a major commercial bank hit by a recent breach.

The agent said they usually handle 50 to 60 calls a day, but in the three days after the hack came to light, weekday call logs show about 180 a day on the data breach alone.

“Because account and transaction information is especially sensitive, many customers called the bank to ask how to respond or who was responsible even when data was leaked earlier in the e-commerce industry,” the agent said. “Some calls take 30 minutes each, and it’s exhausting both physically and mentally.”

Calls about the data leaks began rising after Shinhan Bank disclosed on Oct. 1 that the personal data of about 25,000 customers was leaked in a large-scale hack. Breaches were later confirmed at KB Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank, BNK Busan Bank, Yegaram Savings Bank, Welcome Savings Bank and Hyundai Capital.

The damage is ongoing. OK Savings Bank said on Oct. 15 that hackers had obtained the personal data of 250 customers. The next day it raised the figure to 518 after finding a second attack. 

Customer service departments have been swamped after major corporate incidents before. When SK Telecom’s subscriber identification number hack came to light in April last year, the company handled 10,662 consultations on April 22, the day the breach became public. Three days later, that number had jumped to 42,782, according to call center figures the carrier released at the time. Average wait times rose more than fourfold, from 31 seconds to 2 minutes and 21 seconds.

The complaints pile up on frontline agents who have no decision-making power over the incident, driving up both their workload and their stress.

“When I asked for personal information to check whether a customer had been affected, one person raised their voice, saying, ‘My information was leaked while I was using your service, so how am I supposed to trust you? Are you trying to steal more of my information?’” an agent at a subcontractor for one of the affected commercial banks recalled. “I understand customers’ anxiety about the data leaks, but after listening to sarcastic remarks like ‘Don’t live your life like that’ for a long time, my heart sometimes races after the call ends.”

“As far as I know, call volume for the night shift team surged right after news of this hack broke," another agent who has worked at a commercial bank for 13 years said. “A few years ago, during an outage of another of the bank’s financial services, a customer stayed on the line for three hours without hanging up and kept up a stream of subtle verbal abuse. That experience has stayed with me as trauma, so I’m worried something similar will happen again.”

Frontline staff also took the heat during e-commerce giant Coupang’s personal data breach late last year.

“At the time, many employees complained of hardship as blame was shifted onto them from inside and outside the company,” said Cou-nion, the Coupang branch of the Korean Chemical, Textile and Food Workers’ Union under the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. “Even employees weren’t given enough information about what happened, so the frustration was great.”

“In the early stage of an incident, customer inquiries surge before responsibility has been clearly determined, and since customer centers are often run by subcontractors, the structure makes it hard for agents to voice their difficulties because they are mindful of future contract relationships,” said Hwang Yong-sik, a professor of business administration at Sejong University. “Companies need to review the working conditions of frontline agents, and executives and responsible staff should step forward and lead incident recovery and customer response.”

BY NOH YU-RIM [[email protected]]