Contact management software package

Tender description

We are conducting this procurement process because we want to appoint the most suitable technology partner for the provision of a strategic Customer Contact Centre Platform. The platform will support Thames Water to realise the ambition of becoming a leading digitalised organisation within the Utility sector and provide the foundations for our key organisational strategy of Digital Channel Shift within a wider Customer Experience Management programme of work. These ambitions are imperative for our organisation to provide first class customer engagement upon a modern, cost effective and reliable suite of cloud-based technologies that enables organisational agility. We are conducting this procurement process because we want to appoint the most suitable supplier for the provision of a Customer Experience (CX) contact centre platform that will be awarded as a term contract. The main drivers for this tender are to move forward and make fundamental changes and improvements in how Thames Water interacts with its customers. The key goals are: 1) Realise the ambition of becoming a leading digitalised organisation within the Utility sector This will be realised through: • providing our customers with a differentiated ‘digital first’ experience across multiple channels and touchpoints; • providing our agents with a solution that is intuitive with an optimisation of information presented to guide resolution of our customers concerns; • providing our organisation with a capability to easily pivot channel strategies, messaging and resourcing to cater for large scale incidents; • providing our digital support services with a platform that is stable, scalable and highly available; • enabling future proofing through delivery of a platform that has a strong contact centre focused roadmap in a public cloud environment; • providing our delivery and transformation function a capability of a blended model of delivery, through an agile methodology, alongside our chosen strategic delivery partners. 2) Enable our Virtualised Contact Centre Cluster (multiple locations) with multiple specialised units to be rationalised into a journey based rather than functional contact centre model This will be enabled through: • integration of the proposed platform with digitalised and data driven journeys, requiring a seamless link for our customers and agents to be able to interact at key customer and business moments through an optimal channel for both customer and business outcome; • intelligent routing of interactions to both human and pseudo human operatives utilising a broad dimension of skills and capabilities to optimise the business outcome across multiple journeys at every touch point. 3) Delivering organisational agility and resilience in the case of a major incident which could be linked to one or more of political, environmental, socio-economic or technological factors. This will be delivered through: • a high availability service with geo and carrier resilience; • capability to rapidly respond to external pressures through the provision of additional contact centre environments; • ability to ‘burst’ licences and platform usage to handle unexpected peaks of activity; • provision of a solution that enables distributed and remote working whilst providing a mechanism to maintain QoS from a customer perspective. 4) Providing value to our organisation, lowering overall cost to serve: This will be provided through: • utilisation of a platform with a subscription-based pricing model that includes defined levels of platform support; • utilisation of a platform that utilises a concurrent rather than named user approach to licensing; • removal of multiple contact centre and other associated solutions as a part of implementation of the proposed platform subject to this procurement activity. As a result of this process we will: • appoint our strategic technology partner in the space of customer channel and experience management; • engage with our delivery partner framework and internal delivery and transformation resource to successfully deliver the chosen platform into our organisation (not in scope of this procurement).