"...to give our CSRs a completely effective way to handle inbound password requests in cases where customers no longer had access to their email account."
I personally don't see how having the plain-text passwords help in the case where the person owning the account doesn't have access to their email account. Since they don't have access, you can't exactly email them their password.
Assuming you verify users over the phone securely, why not just reset their passwords for them with a one-time use, temporary password? Surely that's not much harder for the end-user to deal with, and then you needn't store their password...
