AHG_000586 - Contact Centre Technology (CS69)

Who we are? Anchor are the largest provider of specialist Housing and Care for older people in England. We are run "not-for-profit", with a strong balance sheet. We have over 1,700 sites in England including 120 Care homes. We provide 54,000 older people with homes including over 5,000 people in our residential care properties. We look to the future, with an ambitious plan to build 5,700 new homes over the next 10 years.

Contact Centre Technology Project The current contact centre technology (Cisco Call Manager) was implemented in 2013 as part of a wider Voice and Data project. It is a Cisco product that is fully hosted and managed by a third party. The solution no longer meets Anchor's business needs and is no longer aligned with Anchor's technology strategy.

Additionally, in response to the pandemic a cloud telephony solution, Ring Central, was quickly implemented to support homeworking.

This project seeks to procure and implement a new solution to reduce the number of telephony platforms within Anchor, that will be able to support the future organisational needs of Anchor, with the housing business being a priority and allow Anchor to maximise its investments in technology through a platform that will seamlessly integrate with other telephony and customer focussed applications.

Anchor's current inbound/outbound communication methods are independent of each other, with no single overall view of customer interaction. A new modern platform will give this capability, with the ability to expand and add other methods of communication through the omni-channel functionality as Anchor enhances its customer service offering.

Anchor will also be embarking on a project to address the overall telephony platform moving to Microsoft Teams and expect the successful supplier to be in a position to support the new platform in due course - please note that it isn't part of this procurement.

What We Need? We need an organisation to implement, manage and support a modern contact centre technology platform to support our customer service strategy.

Alongside the traditional features of contact centre technology we're also looking for products that offer other wider capabilities such as:

· Connecting different channels like messaging, video, and social media

· Delivering self-service solutions through chatbots and virtual agents

· Analysing conversations to provide useful insights

Additional information: The SQ & ITT will run concurrently so bidders will have to complete both stages at the same time.

Anchor will score all SQ responses and invite a maximum number of suppliers to ITT stage.

Anchor will only score the ITT of those suppliers who are invited from the SQ.

There will be a presentation/interview as part of the process.

The SQ can be found here: https://anchorhanover.wax-live.com/S2C/DisplayModules/TradeModules/Negotiations/Opportunities/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=1301

The ITT can be found here: https://anchorhanover.wax-live.com/S2C/DisplayModules/TradeModules/Negotiations/Opportunities/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=1302