CONTRACT FOR THE PROVISION OF VOICE, UNIFIED COMMS AND CONTACT CENTRE SELECTION IN THE LONDON BOROUGH OF WALTHAM FOREST

The Council of the London Borough of Waltham Forest ("the Authority") invites suitably qualified and experienced organisations to Tender for the Contract for the Provision of Voice, Unified Communications and Contact Centre Selection in the London Borough of Waltham Forest ("the Contract").

The Contract will commence on 1st February 2020 and, subject to satisfactory performance, will operate for a period of (4) years, terminating at midnight on 31st January 2024 with an option to extend for further (2) years which end ("the Contract Period"). At the sole discretion of the Authority and subject to the satisfactory performance of the provider the Contract Period may be extended for up to two (2) years (in such period or periods as the Authority deems appropriate) providing a total possible Contract Period to midnight on 31st January 2026.

Although this solution will provide new telephony, modern cloud systems are centred around interacting with customers across different channels easily. This means our objectives are;

a, Provide a phone system that allows seamless switch between chat, text, IM, email, voice and web forms as well as the basic functionality for making calls across unified communications channel.

b, Provide a contact centre system that supports the management of a call centre and allows processes to be built once and publish in any channel

c, Utilise natural language processing to improve experiences - for example recognising sentiment or key words to help route calls

d, Continuously build knowledge base capacity for responding to simple queries with a voice bot

e, Automate processes, for example delivering end to end through improved voice recognition • Replace current 'Hunt Groups' with intelligent routing

f, Increasing collaboration and mobility supporting the Town Hall Campus programme, including making and receiving council calls on laptops and mobile and significantly improved collaborative voice and video calling