The initial phase is a soft review of a number of suppliers for a new HMRC contact centre as a service (CCaaS) solution to replace the legacy system currently in use.

The procurement process is set to kick off in early 2025.

HMRC stressed: ‘This early-stage, informal engagement will support a greater understanding of capable suppliers, test assumptions and share early draft specifications for discussion.’

The government contract list shows that HMRC has put out an invitation to a number of suppliers to respond to an ‘early engagement’ sounding-out exercise about possible options for a new system. This includes shared-business telephone network services, IP telephone services and electronic message and information services providers.

It is looking for support for HMRC’s development of a single omni channel, contact centre as a service (CCaaS) solution to replace current legacy services.

This will include the provision of product licences, future acquisition and development of products and associated add-on products; service design, implementation and configuration services; and ongoing support services, including pro-active maintenance and testing.

The HMRC brief stated: ‘The current intention of the department is to seek future bids from implementation/support partners, in collaboration with software vendors. This early-stage, informal engagement will support a greater understanding of capable suppliers, test assumptions and share early draft specifications for discussion.’

Technology analysts at Gartner define CCaaS as ‘solutions offering SaaS-based applications that enable customer service departments to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically from both a customer-experience and employee-experience perspective’.

CCaaS solutions offer an adaptive, flexible delivery model with native capabilities for customer service and support.

Increasingly artificial intelligence (AI) is being embedded in CCaaS systems, with generative AI able to enhance the capabilities of staff by providing real-time assistance and providing responses to general enquiries.

A new report by Synergy Research Group showed that AI is being integrated into CCaaS through various approaches, each offering different levels of automation:

AI assist / agent co-pilot: uses generative AI to enhance the capabilities of human agents by providing real-time assistance, generating responses, and automating routine tasks. It empowers agents to handle interactions more effectively.

Limited automation (<30%): in this scenario, AI, including generative AI and conversational AI, is used for basic automation, streamlining simple interactions such as answering FAQs or handling initial customer inquiries, while human agents manage more nuanced tasks.

Major automation (>60%): advanced implementations of AI, particularly generative AI, allow for a high degree of automation, where AI handles most customer interactions. Some companies are exploring fully automated contact centres powered by these technologies.

Jeremy Duke, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said: ‘Generative AI, a powerful subset of AI, is not yet ready to replace all contact centre agents. However, it is already being utilised in specific use cases where full automation is possible, allowing companies to experiment with entirely AI-driven customer service operations.

‘While the CCaaS market remains fast-growing, generative AI can reduce agent turnover and limit the growth of agent headcount by taking over repetitive tasks, enabling agents to focus on more complex, value-added interactions.’

With HMRC under pressure to reduce costs with limited resources, and criticism of recent attempts to close phone helplines, the latest CCaaS systems could provide a fully integrated telephone system for its contact centres, with the technical skills to assess calls and decide which need to be handled by HMRC experts leveraging AI.

The closing date for responses to the initial expression of interest from invited parties is 31 August 2024.

Software vendors have been invited based on their ability to offer a solution that can deliver effectively across all CCaaS capabilities with demonstrable evidence and customer examples of the complexity and scale of HMRC.

HMRC said once the procurement gets underway, ‘implementation partners will be selected based on their specialist capability and ability to deliver implementation through to rolling out live services and optimisation of the system’.