VA seeks industry ideas for contact center tech upgrade
Gettyimages.com / Andriy Onufriyenko
By
Ross Wilkers
The agency is asking for artificial intelligence applications including conversational voice bots and chatbots with multilingual capabilities.
The Veterans Affairs Department has started to canvas industry for ideas on how it can enhance the backend tech infrastructure that supports VA’s contact center operations, including calls and other means of communication.
VA currently utilizes the NICE CXOne platform as the foundational piece of its contact center infrastructure, while other features and enhancements rely on Medalia and integration with an IT service management tool based on ServiceNow.
In a request for information posted Wednesday, VA is asking for input on how it can add more artificial intelligence applications and other new tech functionalities into the contact center environment.
Conversational AI, including voice and chat, is one of 13 new capabilities VA wants as part of any new contact center infrastructure solution.
A statement of work accompanying the RFI describes the conversational AI piece as covering natural language voice bots and chatbots, multilingual capability, intent recognition with contextual memory, dynamic conversation flow generation, and voice AI with natural prosody and interruption handling.
VA also lists these future capabilities as of interest in the RFI:
- AI intent-based routing
- Predictive routing
- Journey-aware routing
- Proactive and predictive service
- Workforce engagement management
- Hyper-personalized customer experience
- Intelligent process automation
- Knowledge intelligence
- Real-time operational intelligence
- Integrated service management
- Simulation-based agent training
- Experience orchestration
The current environment does have some capability in intelligent routing, but VA wants to expand that by incorporating new AI-centric forecasting functions and increasing how prior interactions are considered.
Submissions should not exceed five pages and provide ideas on maintaining, updating and/or replacing the current contact center infrastructure offering. VA also wants respondents to give their view of benefits or risks to their approach.
Responses also must provide details on firm-fixed-price licensing models that support help desk agents and other users, opportunities for future updates and recommended contract vehicles to fulfill the requirement.
The deadline for submissions is 10 a.m. Eastern time on May 4.