While the cost of living in Singapore is constantly rising, why would anyone want to locate a contact centre in the small island state?

Teledirect is one innovative company who sees several advantages in doing so and is now operating Singapore’s largest outsourced contact centre here.

With 410 contact centre seats, Teledirect runs a 24/7, multilingual global customer service contact centre for one of the world’s most respected airlines.

Laurent Junique, its CEO, says “The decision to use Singapore as a centre serving the world was quite simple. We needed a highly reliable infrastructure that can handle mission critical applications such as airline ticket reservations.  Next, we needed to have access to highly competent and service oriented human assets. We found that the Singapore government made it very efficient and convenient for us to bring in foreign talent as well. So, we employ French and German speaking personnel as well as north Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese. It is a lot easier to do this in Singapore than anywhere else in Asia.”

Teledirect also operates a regional Asia-Pacific contact centre for a leading French luxury goods manufacturer. During a recent global customer service benchmark, Teledirect’s centre in Singapore was rated the highest performer among all outsourcers worldwide for this particular client.

Junique says: “We are delighted with this performance and it goes a long way to describing Singapore’s place in the world in terms of productivity and customer service orientation.”

While Singapore is not a low cost contact centre destination, Junique points out that productivity differences in service organisations cannot be compared to the manufacturing sector. The productivity between two manufacturing operators could vary by 10-20% at most, while in the service sector the variation is far greater and 50-100% is pretty common.

The same applies in the outsourcing world. Teledirect found through several benchmarking analysis that in-house contact centres can often be less productive than outsourced.

That can be explained by analysing the number of hours a service staff is scheduled for and the productive time it really spends every hour performing tasks. Productivity ratios also vary from one country to another so it is important for organisations to do a thorough analysis of cost reductions against productivity losses.

Looking at the future of contact centre outsourcing, Junique sees more opportunities for high-end customer service in Singapore. “We often compare Singapore to First Class, Malaysia to Business Class then comes the Economy class in very-low-wage countries. And we see an increasing trend of clients segregating customer service by customer tiers. Premium customers are handled in First Class operations while mid tier and low tier customers are handled in other markets.”