Telecommunications services

Tender description

VIVID wishes to procure and implement a Cloud Omnichannel contact centre platform that will provide a wide range of functionality for use within the contact centre, remove any dependencies on VIVID premises and current co-lo data centre hosting. This will allow us to provide excellent customer service by offering customers their ‘channel of choice’ and will improve our agility and business continuity capabilities. Please visit https://procontract.due-north.com/Advert/Index?advertId=639a2e20-e4e2-ea11-8104-005056b64545 to register your interest. VIVID are a leading provider of affordable housing, providing homes and housing-related services and support to approximately 70 000 customers. VIVID has over 30 000 homes in the south of England spanning Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire and expanding into West Sussex. We aim to provide our customers with innovative, modern, and accessible services that reflect the ‘digital world’. The contact centre (the CX Team) is located at VIVID’s Basingstoke office and is the single point for all customer contacts, as such it is a critical service dealing with contacts from a number of different channels (telephone, email, web chat, social media) and we undertake outbound activities (SMS and Telephony Calls). There are currently 48 FTE agents, 17 repairs planners and 14 managers/supervisors within the contact centre. All agents are multiskilled and deal with contacts ranging from rent payments, debt recovery and money advice to new and existing repairs, gas servicing, and general customer services requests (and pretty much anything else). Also, as part of this project, VIVID wishes to introduce contract centre capabilities to the IT service desk; it serves staff (not external customers). VIVID wants to improve user experience and management visibility of demand and efficiency through implementing the core and a sub-set of the features and functions required by the CX Team. VIVID has an aging Siemens/Unify telephony system that is hosted in a co-located data centre in Redhill, Surrey. The system requires replacement as it is several versions behind current software release levels and has limited vendor support. Furthermore, it is restricting our ambitions of delivering improved agility and integrating with digital channels and technologies such as Microsoft Teams. VIVID is in the process of deploying Microsoft Teams Voice and will use this as the end-user telephony solution, with Gamma Telecom’s ‘Direct Routing for Teams’ service, i.e. Teams will perform all PBX functionality and provide all outgoing and incoming PSTN line connectivity for all users across VIVID’s business; the contact centre solution shall use this service for all outbound and inbound external telephone calls and shall not use any independent SIP Trunks or other exchange line connections. This approach forms part of the IT strategy to implement telephony and unified communications across all areas of the organisation using Microsoft Teams, thus giving a consistent, common set of tools used by everyone bidders should note that supply and implementation of Microsoft Teams and PSTN breakout is outside of the scope of the contact centre procurement project. VIVID is in the process of upgrading the Citrix server infrastructure to Citrix virtual Apps and Desktops v7 1912, which will be hosted on Windows Server 2019 machines. VIVID is also looking at the possibility of reducing reliance on Citrix in the near future by deploying Windows 10 laptop devices and a full ‘fat client’ Windows 10 desktop with Office 365 suite across all devices. Citrix will still be used to stream the core business applications (including the Housing Management system (including the CRM module) to the local desktop VIVID wishes to procure and implement a Cloud Omnichannel contact centre platform that will provide a wide range of functionality for use within the contact centre, remove any dependencies on VIVID premises and current co-lo data centre hosting. This will allow us to provide excellent customer service by offering customers their ‘channel of choice’ and will improve our agility and business continuity capabilities. The contact centre platform shall fully integrate with Microsoft Teams as stated in section 5.2. of the Technical Statement of Requirements (TSoR). Please visit https://procontract.due-north.com/Advert/Index?advertId=639a2e20-e4e2-ea11-8104-005056b64545 to register your interest.