Veterans Affairs previews contact center infrastructure competition

The Veterans Affairs Department is developing a contract to expand the infrastructure for its call center platform, known as Genesys CX.

VA wants interested bidders to respond by Nov. 5 to a new sources sought notice released Wednesday. The agency will award the order through the government-wide Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions vehicle.

VA already picked a contact center platform developed by Genesys Telecommunications Labs (Genesys Cloud CX) and is now seeking an infrastructure-as-a-service solution to support the contact center.

The infrastructure will need to support 140 million contacts a year, accommodating 18,750 agents and 62 individual contact centers. VA wants seamless interoperability between the different centers.

The infrastructure will support services such as the Veterans Crisis Line and other VA hotlines.

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VA expects it to manage multiple channels of communications – phone, text, email, webchat and fax. VA will also need the infrastructure to operate at all times.

Some of the technical requirements include a FedRAMP moderate authorization, usage the Genesys Cloud CX platform, artificial intelligence integration with Salesforce, and manage up to 20,000 seats. Minimum availability is 99.99%.

Key capabilities VA wants include workforce management and quality management, toll-free services, disaster recovery/continuity of operations, and advanced routing and queuing.

Only the EIS primes are eligible to bid: AT&T, Verizon, BT Federal, Comcast, MetTel, Lumen, AOC Connect, Granite Telecommunications and L3Harris.

The value of the task order has not been disclosed. VA is expected to release a final solicitation in January with an award in April.