Shinhan call center staff to work from home

A Shinhan Bank call center employee wearing a mask works at the bank's Gangnam District gu office in Seoul, Friday. The bank installed higher partition walls to prevent the spread of COVID-19. / Courtesy of Shinhan Bank

By Park Jae-hyuk

Shinhan Bank has become the nation's first commercial bank to allow its customer service center employees to work from home, amid growing fears of potential mass infection of COVID-19 at call centers.

Since the cluster infection at Metanet Mplatform call center in Seoul's Guro District, outsourced by Chubb's ACE American Insurance, the authorities have urged financial services companies to make their call centers less crowded.

In response, Shinhan decided to let 150 workers do their jobs from home starting Monday.

The bank said Sunday its 448 employees who work weekdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at call centers in Seoul and Incheon will work from home on rotation.

If the situation gets worse, the number of call center staff working from home will be 250 per day.

Shinhan installed VoIPs and laptops equipped with the company software in the employee's homes.

According to the bank, those who work from home will not need access to customers' personal information, because they will just explain financial products and ways to use non-face-to-face channels.

If they need access to personal information, they will be able to forward their calls to their colleagues working at offices.

Shinhan said employees who offer services in sign language and who handle voice phishing reports will continue to work at their offices.

In addition, the bank widened spaces between call center workers and raised the height of partition walls to 97 centimeters from 60 centimeters, as part of measures to prevent the spread of the virus.

“As fears have grown over the spread of COVID-19 in crowded offices like call centers, we decided to allow our workers to work from home in line with government policies on infection control,” a Shinhan Bank official said.

“We will do our best to protect our customers, employees and local communities.”

Shinhan's precautionary approach is expected to prompt other financial services firms to consider allowing their call center staff to work from home.

Most financial firms have said they are unable to allow their call center employees to work from home, due to possible personal information leaks and a lack of systems.

Instead, they have sent part of their work force to additional offices or adopted the shift system.

According to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters, there are 63,000 employees who work for 701 call centers of financial firms nationwide.