Korea’s Customer Support Call Centers

Nine at sharp in the morning. A tense atmosphere could be felt in the office.

Lee Mi-hyang, a veteran agent who has been working for a call center for eight years, pushed the ‘waiting’ button with her headset on at 9:00 a.m., looking into her computer monitor. This is the sign that she is ready to take calls.

With a buzzing sound, a message popped up on her monitor. It is a call from her first customer of the day. The busiest time for Lee has just begun. Lee usually works for 8 hours from nine a.m. to six p.m., except for one hour of lunchtime.

2,600 complaint calls a day on average-

Most calls, which Lee takes in the morning, report the loss of credit cards. According to Samsung Card, 52,122 reports of losses were taken between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., when many people wake up. Calls which were made before 7:00 a.m. did not reach 5,000 cases per hour.

Most people go to work between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. Reports of losses of cards were dramatically reduced during that time to 28,967. In between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., reports of loss increase rapidly again after most people get to the work. It might be that there are many people who realize that they have lost cards, opening their wallets during their commute to the workplace.

At 11:00 a.m., Lee is able to take a break for just a moment. At lunchtime, the calls drop to 60,000 per hour. And yet, her respite is very brief. Her afternoon is harder than the morning. In the morning, most call is urgent report of the loss, and therefore there are hardly calls taking more than three minutes. However, from 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon onwards, people often make complaint calls, which usually take more than ten minutes. The Samsung Call Center takes on average 2,600 complaint calls a day. Each agent out of a total of 700 agents at the call center takes four complaint calls a day.

The Samsung Card Call Center gets busy in December when there are many gatherings, and in January when there are many kinds of questioning calls. In December, more than 90,000 reports of card losses were made. Considering the report of calls on average by month (75,000), this represents an increase of 20 percent.

In January, calls to question tax deductions and to make pre-payments of credit cards increase very much, agents should be on the alert.

Kim Il-hun at CRM operation team of Samsung Card said, “Pre-payment credit card calls is up to average 125,000 per month, but in January, March and June they average more than 140,000 calls. It is because many companies provide year-end bonuses or monthly rewards at that time.”

While there are many customers who make pre-payment of credit cards in January, calls which request increasing the limit of credit card use by 10 percent amount because of insufficiency of money in May and June. This is because there are many couples who need sizable sums of money ahead of marriage.

sanhkim@donga.com