Bahk Eun-ji has been with The Korea Times since 2012, building a career across multiple desks. She began at the Business Desk, where she conducted in-depth interviews with key figures in Korea's corporate world. Later, she moved to the Politics & City Desk, focusing on education policy and social affairs. She later served as team leader of the digital content team, leading curation efforts on the newspaper’s homepage and reshaping print stories for social media audiences to enhance digital reach. Now back on the Politics Desk, she covers the National Assembly and the Ministry of National Defense, with a renewed focus on political developments.
KORAIL under fire for manipulating customer survey
By Bahk Eun-ji
Employees of the state-run railway operator manipulated the results of a customer satisfaction survey by pretending to be independent train users to boost customer satisfaction ratings ensuring they would receive larger bonuses, according to a government audit Monday.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said 208 employees of the Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL) were allegedly involved in the satisfaction survey manipulation.
Son Byung-seok, CEO of the Korean Railroad Corp. (KORAIL) /Yonhap
By Bahk Eun-ji
The customer satisfaction survey is conducted at least once a year for citizens receiving public services in accordance with the Act on Management of Public Institution. The results are reflected in public institution's management performance evaluation indicators, which are also used as a standard for incentives.
Among the total 1,438 survey responses, 222, accounting for 15.4 percent of the total were answered by the employees of the railroad company. Some staff pretended to be customers to deceive survey conductors and participated in the on-site survey two to three times.
In particular, the office in Seoul was found to have intervened in the entire survey process including organizing staff to monitor the location of surveys and send messages in a group chat room to inform coworkers of the locations where the surveys were being conducted. In the case of Seoul, the transport ministry said it has confirmed that among the 191 responses collected, 136, or 71.2 percent were given by employees of the Seoul office.
KORAIL headquarters in Daejeon. /Courtesy of KORAIL
The sales offices of three regional headquarters including Busan and South Gyeongsang Province encouraged their employees to take part in the survey manipulation in order to raise their scores. The ministry has requested a police investigation of 16 employees.
The ministry issued an “institutional warning” to the railway operator, and took a disciplinary order against nine executives involved in the survey manipulations. It also plans to notify the Ministry of Economy and Finance of the results of the audit.
The finance ministry plans to review follow-up measures, including recoupment of the performance-based incentives that were issued under the false premise to the involved executives and employees. The evaluation results of this year will be announced in June.
KORAIL said it has accepted the audit results by the ministry, and vowed to prevent the recurrence of such incidents.
“We apologize to the public for the survey manipulation. KORAIL will work hard to become a trusted public institution by strictly punishing all staff involved in the incident, and coming up with fundamental measures to prevent a recurrence,” a KORAIL official said.