Supply services of personnel including temporary staff

Tender description

Northumbrian Water Ltd (NWL) is looking to partner, with an external company, to provide a flexible homeworking capability for contact associated with billing processes. NWL have 2 on-premise contact centres in the UK (Durham and Lowestoft) that manage all customer contact. One type of this contact is billing, which is the sole scope of this proposal. There is insufficient resource to cover demand at peak times e.g. billing windows, weekends, Monday mornings. Consequently, NWL wish to satisfy customer demand by having a flexible capability to accommodate this contact. Initially 5 homeworkers will be required from contract award in December 2019. It is anticipated that this will increase over the contract to 25 homeworkers required in total to supplement on-premise advisors. NWG are exploring options to provide extra capacity and flexibility in its contact centres and wish to contract for a homeworking solution to provide extra capacity and flexibility required to respond to peak demand, as and when it is needed, to improve our customer experience. NWG operate a contact centre at Pity Me in Durham and Lowestoft in Suffolk operating 8.00 to 22.00 Local UK time Monday to Friday and 8.00 to 13.00 Local UK time on Saturday. Homeworkers must be available on UK public holidays where they fall on a weekday. Rostering will be agreed with NWL in advance. The scope of this procurement is to provide a Homeworking Solution to provide additional billing contact centre support, by using a team of trained homeworkers (ideally within the NWL operating areas), who will be dedicated to NWL calls. The partner will be responsible for recruiting and sourcing resources as per NWL requirements and person specification. Upon selection, the partner will be responsible for on-boarding of the resource which includes (but is not exclusive to) the following: experience and employment references; qualifications; photographic identification; right to work in the UK; disclosure of criminal convictions; introduction to NWL policy and procedures; requests for system access. The partner will also be responsible for off-boarding the resource which includes: return of any hardware and request for removal from NWL systems. The partner will be responsible for managing all HR issues (i.e. sickness, unplanned leave). The initial number of homeworkers required to start immediately is 5. This will be ramped up to approximately 25. The approximate planned date for all 25 homeworkers to be online mid to late 2020. All will work within the customer (billing) process.