1. Starting too late
Most organisations start thinking about tendering their contact centre when the contract has almost run out. That leaves a year, and a European tender with market consultation, requirements specification, publication, evaluation, award, standstill period and implementation only just fits, provided nothing goes wrong. The result is that the contract gets extended on worse terms, or the implementation lands in the summer holidays.
Start two years before the contract ends. Not by writing requirements, but by asking what is not working well today and what you want five years from now. And at that stage, bring in someone who knows the market. We always say: call us before the market consultation, not after it.
2. Copying the current system into the requirements specification
Ask a functional administrator what the new system should be able to do and you get a description of the old system, plus the three things it lacks. That produces a requirements specification only the current supplier can answer well. The rest of the market drops out.
“A requirements specification that describes your current system is a contract extension with extra steps.”
Describe instead what you want to achieve: which contact reasons, which channels, which service standards, which teams and locations. Let suppliers explain how they would solve it. An association with almost 800,000 members did just that: first a preliminary study of the current and desired state of its application landscape, and only then the RFP process. The outcome was an omnichannel platform that fitted, not a copy of the old one with a new logo.
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3. Counting features instead of naming problems
A requirements list of three hundred lines in which every feature is marked “must” or “wish” feels thorough. In practice every supplier answers everything with “yes, compliant”, and after the evaluation nothing sets them apart. What does set them apart is a limited number of scenarios that describe what actually happens in your organisation:
- The Monday morning peak. Three outpatient clinics open at the same time and the queue fills up. What does the team leader see, and what can they do?
- On-call duty at the weekend. How does a call to the on-call number reach whoever is on duty, and what happens if they do not answer?
- The council question. The municipal executive wants to know whether the citizen contact centre (KCC) met the service standard per channel last quarter. How does that figure get on the table?
- The outage on Saturday evening. Who calls whom, and how quickly is it resolved?
4. Forgetting insight and reporting
Routing, IVR menus and CRM integration get plenty of attention in every requirements specification. Real-time insight and reporting often get a single line: “the solution offers dashboards and reports”. After implementation it then turns out the dashboard cannot be customised, cannot show other sources and is charged per user. Describe exactly what you want to see, for whom, how real-time it must be and who is allowed to change it. Or keep insight out of the tender and choose a system-independent dashboard that works on any platform, including the next one.
5. Not factoring in vendor lock-in
You buy a contact centre platform for five years, but you want to keep the data, the dashboards, the recordings and the knowledge base for longer. Ask explicitly in the tender how you get out: which data can you export, in what format, and what does it cost? Also ask whether integrations are open through a documented API. A platform you can only leave with the supplier’s help sets the price of your next tender.
6. Leaving administration out of the picture
Who manages the platform after the award? Often the answer is a colleague in IT who also does a hundred other things. An autonomous administrative authority for vehicle registration ran into exactly this: too little functional and technical expertise in telephony administration. Tailored training for new administrators, with weekly aftercare, filled that gap. It is better to arrange it up front. Include administration, training and standby cover outside office hours in the tender, or arrange it separately through Effecta Nexus.
7. A weighting where price always wins
On paper, quality counts for sixty per cent and price for forty. In practice all bidders score between seven and eight on quality, and price decides. That is down to the way bids are assessed, not the weighting.
| Criterion | What often happens | What works better |
|---|---|---|
| Quality | Assessed on written answers, everyone scores average | Assessed on scenarios and a demo on your own data |
| Price | Licence per user per month only | Total cost over the contract term, including implementation, administration and exit |
| Implementation | Not weighted | Plan, lead time and who carries it out all count |
| References | Three logos on a slide | A conversation with a comparable organisation |
Calculate the price over the whole term, including implementation, administration, additional work and the cost of getting out again. A low licence price with expensive integrations is rarely the cheapest over five years.
8. No demo on your own data
A demo on the supplier’s demo data shows what the product can do when everything lines up. A demo on your queues, your teams and your opening hours shows what the product does when it runs in your organisation. Ask the last two or three bidders to work out a scenario with your data, or include a Proof of Concept phase in the tender. It saves you from discovering after the award that the wallboard cannot show opening hours per outpatient clinic.
9. Implementation and migration out of scope
The tender is about software, so implementation is “to be agreed”. That agreement happens after the award, when the supplier has already been chosen and the price is fixed. Include implementation and migration in the request: who does what, in which phases, how staff are trained, what happens to the old environment and who the point of contact is. Especially with a migration carried out entirely remotely, as at the association with 800,000 members, you want that written down beforehand.
10. Nobody managing the supplier after the award
After the award the project team disbands and the supplier is left with an organisation that has no time. Agreements fade, additional work piles up and nobody remembers what was promised. Appoint a contact person who manages the supplier during implementation and the first contract years, with the tender documents to hand. That can be someone internal, or an independent consultant with no stake in the supplier.
Effecta has extensive experience with private, public and European tenders for contact centre telephony, omnichannel, chatbots and knowledge management. We know the market and the prices, and we do not sell a contact centre platform ourselves. Is a tender coming up? Read how we help, or first take the Real Contact Scan to see where you stand today.