AT FIRST glance, OCBC's award-winning contact centre seems more like a Disney movie set than a bank office.

The centre adopts a different decor motif every year. Cartoons are in now and have made the facility a riot of colours with illustrated characters hanging from ceilings and clinging to walls.

'We do all we can to help the staff to relax. After all, they work in a very stressful environment,' says Ms Ann Khong, head of the centre, which handles customer calls and e-mail.

The contact centre - call centre in the old jargon - deals with almost 10,000 calls daily and employs more than 100 staff in five service teams deployed in varying numbers around the clock according to needs.

About 50 to 60 people man the lines from 9am to 4pm daily, the peak period in terms of calls, but this falls to around five by midnight.

Attention to detail and efforts to maintain staff morale earned the centre six awards in the Contact Centre Association of Singapore's International Contact Centre Awards 2009 in September.

It was the first to win the Best Contact Centre of the Year award for the over 100-seat category for three years running.

Ms Khong says efforts to maintain morale play a big part in its success. Operators, known as customer service executives, are treated to green bean soup, barley drinks and other refreshments a few times a week. 'This helps to preserve the voices of the staff, who are often on the phone,' says Ms Khong.

There are also game days and a prominent brass bell that is rung whenever an operator gets a compliment from a customer, allowing colleagues to offer a round of applause.

Recruiting and training highly qualified operators to man the phone lines are also crucial.

'Gone are the days when contact centre and call centre staff are viewed as order-takers,' says Ms Khong.

'Nowadays, these staff are expected to provide consultative solutions... (and) help callers structure their housing loans, for instance. The level of thinking is very different now.'

She says the operators have to be well-versed in all aspects of the banking process and be familiar with the range of financial products, making them multi-skilled professionals.

In line with this, OCBC pays competitive rates to the mostly local diploma and degree holders it employs to man the phone lines.

It also does its best to debunk the notion held in some quarters that call centre work is a dead-end job.

New hires get a structured career path and can get transfers to other banking positions within OCBC or cross-border job opportunities to the bank's Asia-Pacific operations.

The organisation has set itself high standards. It aims to answer 80 per cent of all calls within 20 seconds compared with an industry norm of 80 per cent within 40 seconds, says Ms Khong.

OCBC surpassed its own standards by answering 85 per cent of calls within 20 seconds for the 12 months to February, she adds.

The content of the calls is also monitored to ensure standards. An SMS feedback system randomly polls callers on their service experience.

The centre aims to achieve customer satisfaction ratings above eight at all times. For the year to February, it averaged a satisfaction score of 8.8.

After initial calls to the centre, comprehensive procedures are in place to regulate follow-up action.

For instance, the service recovery unit follows through with customers who lodge complaints. It must return three calls within three months of the initial complaint to ensure that the problem is resolved and to address any other issues.

Ms Yvonne Gan, 48, has been a customer service executive for over four years.

Ms Gan, who has an honours degree in business administration from Britain's Loughborough University, has seen her fair share of challenging callers, especially upset or angry customers who call in for clarification about their bank accounts or loans.

'Other than the issue with their finances, they may be having difficult times in their lives and sometimes when they call us they need to air and share their feelings,' she says.

'For instance, during the financial turmoil last year, we had some very worried customers who needed assurance.

'We always keep in mind that we need to address the feelings of our customers first. We focus a lot on our tone of voice to convey our sincerity and assurance to them that we are here to help solve their problems.'

Ms Gan credits the centre's supportive work environment for giving her the emotional resilience to deal with the tougher customers. She also says the challenges of dealing with different people daily keeps her glued to her job.

It is this dynamism that keeps Ms Monica Ong, 33, at the contact centre.

She joined the centre six years ago and has risen to become the assistant vice-president of the service recovery and process management team.

'I have learnt many things about handling customers and banking operations and I am still learning, even in my current role,' says Ms Ong, a philosophy major from the National University of Singapore. 'That is why I continue in this line.'

The greatest satisfaction for the centre's staff lies in 'turning an unhappy customer into a happy one', as Ms Gan puts it.

In 2007, an angry client frustrated over issues regarding her mortgage was so impressed by the centre's 'sincerity and commitment' in dealing with her that she went to the premises and painted a calligraphic scroll as a gesture of appreciation.

The scroll depicted the Chinese words for 'cream of the crop'.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.