Creating RFP for Call Center: Once Complex, Now Easy

Share this page:
Call centers are still the best way to sell products and services, because of speed and effectiveness. They’re like vital bridges in a B2B and B2C environment. The bigger your business, the more you need stability and functionality of this bridge. While this bridge works properly, customers open their wallets while speaking with agents over the phone.

Changing technologies in a contact center platform is inevitable due to high competition. Yet competition is always the place for business growth. Technologies for contacting customers across digital channels with the purpose of higher ROI are constantly evolving. These days, companies that have cutting-edge call center software and hardware are secure.

Depending on the size of your business, you need to consider that choosing a new contact center vendor with complex experiences and qualifications for challenging RFP projects is crucial.

Have you ever wondered why RFP projects for contact centers are more profitable than others? And why do companies regret that they haven't applied a sample of RFP questions to ask vendors? Actually, in this article, we disclose all pros and cons. You'll find out how a call center proposal sample flourishes businesses with revenue growth. 

The big picture of an RFP call center process

A call center statement of work is constantly growing sales, customer experience, and brand image. However, if your call center expands, you need the procurement process to establish your growth.

The RFP call center is a document, and it's not about the ordinary sales tool that you need present in any situation when you need a vendor. In the case of the sales offer, vendors will be intimidated by the number of requirements for the project. The RFP is only for challenging projects that require deep expertise, technology, and experience.

The RFP is not only about existing technical or software innovations. Yes, it's possible to create a solution that doesn't exist yet. And achieve competitive and sustainable growth with sales RFP software.

Most governments use RFP projects to ensure that their vendors are top-notch professionals and qualified for the project. However, mid and enterprise businesses over the globe do the same way. And you can easily observe how they publicly establish their ideal call center proposal sample.

The evaluation process of the RFP call center software vendor

During challenges RFP projects, companies and vendors evaluate their capabilities for a particular project, both financial and technological. Observing specific requirements, vendors forecast the playing field of the project, ask relevant questions, and decide whether they qualified enough for it or not.

 The on-demand RFP project looks as follows: launching global scale activity when previously the company operated at a local level. Or the RFP project drastically changes the technologies and software of a contact center. 

Enterprise-level call center, sell final expenses and lead to creating successful RPF document. 

Most of the RFP projects are expensive and time-consuming activities for both company and the vendor. And to achieve new technologies and expand bold software landscapes, you need to have the RFP stage in B2B.

The most valuable part of the RFP process is finding the right vendor, which meets your business and technical expectations. 

On the other hand, vendors, which take RFP projects, briefly look at a call center proposal template and evaluate their capacities, experience, and authority to accomplish challenging RFP projects. 

Call center proposals to vendors must be properly established and presented. In this case, finding the vendor through authoritative recommendations from partners is a great decision. But what if you haven't anyone on your mind for it? 

We’ve collected the most timely and relevant information about creating and establishing easy RFP response software for a contact center in a simple and precise fashion. This article is the deep-expertise guidance on how to establish a contact center proposal to vendors. Then evaluate bidders and succeed in accomplishing the RFP project. Read on.

Types of process requests for contact or call center RFP, RFQ, RFI

RFP document encompasses RFQ and RFI documents for the education of vendors towards project implementation. 

RFP for vendor call center

What is a request for proposal (RFP)? Briefly, an RFP (Request For Proposal) is a document or procurement process that companies present to vendors (procurement team) to establish new contact center software solutions and technology solutions into fruition. During this project, you'll need to ask critical call center RFP questions to vendors.

Whether you choose your contact or B2B call center vendor, there are no small or irrelevant details in a project. However, even in a business-to-customer environment, every piece of information regarding a B2C call center vendor and your company will be valuable. 

In addition, once the center deploys changes, you need to establish a possible forecast for innovation in the future. 

The main stages of a call or contact center technology solutions regarding contact or call center RFP requirements and call center RFP template look as follows:

  • Statement of purpose. The first and critical part of the RFP is to present to vendors the current state of a company and a clear vision after the accomplishment of the RFP project and customer experience strategies. 

The RFP process is huge work for vendors, and it's crucial to highlight the precise steps and key due dates in accomplishing a project to eliminate misunderstood and money-time wasting.  

In addition, in the RFP document, you need to establish the bottom-line and extended requirements to vendors. Specifically, it shows requirements for experience and expertise in implementing similar projects. 

The document must contain data about the scale of operation(global or local), the customer experience technology they need, and qualification for accomplishing a particular RFP project. Clear goals in the beginning, middle, and end of this document grant success for different types of contact center solutions.

  • Background information for RFP for contact center solution. Thinking about issues - how to create an RFP document, you need to think about what type of information you collected and present. You need to provide all valuable background information about the project. So without deep expertise, every vendor could understand their chances.

Describe in detail the history of your company, current state of technologies, the scale of work. Provide historical data about how your company and previous contact center RFP that operated in previous years.

Essentially, to provide the information about how big your contact center is, how many seats you need to have, and how extensive the area of work for your contact center (worldwide/local). Mention what type of software you have and what software or technology you wish to have. Tell everything about channels of communication you have and how you need to change them.

It's crucial to inform about the compliance, data protection, information security, internal process, and customer experience solutions you wish to see at the end of the project.

  • Scope of the work. What specifically do you want your vendors to do for you? Is your desire to move to the cloud contact center, on-premise, or hybrid? Will cloud capabilities improve your stability, increase your effectiveness/efficiency, increase the security level, improve SLA? As a result, customer service and RFP projects must work in consonance after deployment to ensure business continuity.
  • Outcome and performance standards. Particular changes must work from the first day of deployment. You need to exclude any interruption of the business process and in your current working processes.
  • Payment. How will the payment process for the RFP occur? Is there one big check, partial or a monthly payment? Do software updates require an additional fee? How much will it cost to achieve improvements or updates for software after the project?
  • Contractual terms and conditions for contact center technology vendor. RFP for call center services 2021 must comply with standards. These are important legal sections, certifications ISO, OSHA standards. At this stage, parties will present their view of the project and legal issues.
  • Requirements for proposals. RFP has to describe the documents, which vendors must include. These documents are registration data, cases, referrals from clients, graduation of employees, and annual reports.
  • Precise timeline and key due dates. This stage reflects timelines and key due dates. It reflects timelines for starting the bidding, documents overview, and decisions making. Describe how the process of negotiations with vendors and signing contracts will occur. These are the most critical RFP questions templates you need to answer.
  • Custom experiences. It will be great to have an option for authorized customization of the RFP project on the steps of implementation or afterward. Of course, it's not necessary, yet it's pretty desirable. For example, is there an option to add the interactive voice response (IVR) system or similar systems? These days, including IVR, ACD, or similar systems in RFP, is easy.

    However, you need to check a project for systems that you can integrate into your contact center. You just read about basic sample RFP questions, but there is much more about them.
  • Technology RFP template. RFP includes additional documents such as a request for information (RFI) and a request for quotation (RFQ). And each one of the requests is a vital part of the sample RFP for software.
  • Software RFP sample. The information listed above is used for creating a successful call center RFP sample. Here you can find the most demanding answers to software RFP questions to create your own sample software RFP template. 

RFI 

RFI is the request for information, which is one of the critical documents vendors wish to observe. A company requests the RFI document to ask the most demanding vendor questions. The document educates the requestor about finance, technologies, legal terms, and dates regarding a project.

The requestors involved in the project ask for the pieces of information to evaluate the overall project. A company needs to ease RFI software for proposals requests, so vendors observe it rapidly, ideally in the time when they want.

Requesting is possible either from departments or persons involved in the project. An RFI must contain data about these popular questions:

  • Services;
  • Capabilities;
  • Strategies;
  • Business process for collecting written info about the capabilities of various vendors;
  • Companies clarify important points with RFI;
  • Objective/Summary;
  • Timeline;
  • Storyboard;
  • Evaluation criteria for;
  • Payment.

By requesting an RFI document, the contact center vendor achieves a clear vision of the project. Vendors should request an RFI upfront, so there are a few days for a company to prepare necessary documents.

RFQ

Request for quotation is the request for specific prices and quantities. It also contains information about products and services, schedules of services, etc. It will simplify comparing the prices of vendors and then short-listing them. The list of questions of the RFQ encompasses:

  1. Budget;
  2. Resource availability;
  3. Capabilities;
  4. Certifications;
  5. Specifications including detailed: items/services;

The standard RFP contact center processes

There is no reason for blunt copying the technological solutions of a particular company. You need to have your own templates for your project. In designing your RFP technology template, you need to follow rules that bring your RFP to success.

All processes in creating and implementing an RFP project must be a tightly-organized process and structured procurement process.

Defining internal company stakeholders

To create an RFP, you must arrange a meeting with internal stakeholders and discuss the keynotes of the project. 

After careful discussion, key stakeholders of the contact center, like the Head of the contact center and IT executive, must outline crucial features of the project. If you have no experience in creating an RFP project for your company, it's better to look at an RFP software sample in this article.

Customer care team - stakeholder involvement in creating an RFP will pay off. Employee experience is valuable data for your RFP project. They work in the front line of a contact center and have valuable information to share. 

Crucial open-ended RFP questions to ask vendors:

  • What are the key achievements at the end of the RFP project?

  • Does a company migrate to on-premise, hybrid, or cloud-based RFP solutions?

  • How will our software integrate with existing hardware?

  • What are the short/long-term business goals?

  • Will particular RFP contact center work on a local or a global scale?

  • How can we safely collect, share and store the data from a customer and company?

  • What type of contact center technology solutions are we ready to deploy?

  • Is there a forecast for additional changes in RFP for a call center?

  • Is there deep research on a call center vendors list?

  • Who will be responsible for choosing a call center software vendor?

Setting goals and requirements discussion

Stakeholders outline what exactly this project does for the contact center and set requirements. All involved people should scope the entire project for the cornerstones, solutions, terms, budget, security, etc.

Vendor evaluation and selection (criteria)

Evaluation is an essential process for defining the most qualified vendor for your project. This is the place where you have a wide range of vendors. The qualified and authoritative vendor is a rare breed type of company.

Evaluate them in the sequence that matches your requirements. The most important evaluation criteria of your vendors are:

  • Capabilities of vendors. Depending on your project, some vendors will be less experienced and qualified. Experience in a particular type of RFP project is the single most valuable asset of any kind of vendor. You need to hire a newbie to make things happen, and they don’t. Watch reviews, history, experience, and technologies that the vendor has by making a decision about hiring a particular vendor.
  • The clear vision of vendors. The most qualified vendors in your RFP project have both qualifications and a clear vision. These vendors have experience, knowledge and have previous successes in accomplishing similar types of RFP projects.
  • Price of the RFP for call center software. Is the budget of your project matching the price vendors want to request? Some vendors charge too much or too low a price for work. In both cases, you need to decide whether a particular price is fair or there is an additional discussion with stakeholders.

    However, the most qualified vendors will charge the highest fee on the market. So you have to decide how much money you’re ready to spend additional money for the project.

Questions to the contact center vendor

In the bidding stage, you need to negotiate and choose the best vendor for the project by asking helpful questions. One of the crucial moments when you need to request detailed information upfront about the vendor’s company and its successes is bidders time. 

It's the moment when you collect data about connected experiences, technologies, and software. Collected data you discuss with stakeholders to forecast further negotiations and achieve an extensive picture of each vendor. The most popular list of questions you need to ask:

  • How does your vendor want to support and maintain the project?

  • Is the price fair for the particular project?

  • Does the vendor have enough resources to support projects at all stages of the project?

  • How will the vendor secure the data and information from the third party?

  • Does it have enough protection from DDOS attacks?

  • Does it have a high level of protection against data leaking?

  • How does the vendor control the implementation process?

  • Can you track the process of the project's implementation?

  • Is there a possibility of delay in a time crunch?

  • Is there a cloud, on-premises, or hybrid option for a contact center

  • Are they ready to sign up for the disclosure documents?

  • Is cloud RFP management an easy process for a company?

If a project has unclear or great areas of the document, you need to discuss these grey areas of the contract and define cornerstones. Although this is a tightly organized process, it's inevitable on the stage of the agreement.

Mistakes to avoid

The stage of selecting a new contact center vendor is not about quick decisions. To implement the quality assurance process to succeed, you need to avoid a few crucial mistakes.

The first biggest mistake in achieving the best business RFP software is choosing the wrong vendor. It occurs when your research of vendors is not deep enough. For example, you missed that particular vendor's lack of technologies for deploying your project. Or a particular vendor doesn't operate on a global scale.

To ensure that everything is set, use sample questions for vendors listed above.

The second biggest mistake that companies commit is they place an unclear or grey area in an RFP. 

When something doesn’t outline in the RFP, it’s up to the vendor to accomplish this task or not. Vendors have the legal right to accomplish only the steps included in the RFP project. Remember that because this is a frequent and costly mistake.

The third biggest mistake is that an RFP is produced too fast and without proper treatment. In this case, stakeholders lack a clear vision about the impact of the RFP on their company. They've spent too little time gathering all information, all people, and all resources.

As a result, they've chosen the wrong vendor. Everyone wants to achieve the best things in a minimum time, but this is not the way the RFP must work.

Remember that the best RFP software solutions come from deep research and evaluating processes. And notice that RFP must be precise yet contain room for flexible changes towards the project. By doing so, you'll find the right vendor and solutions when you need additional improvements.

Yes, the market of contact center software already generated over 17.5 billion dollars this year. And it is expected to generate over 35 billion dollars in 2023. This is no accidental growth, it's just scientific regularity and an exciting time for you.

How can you benefit from all of this?

For more than a decade, Voiptime Cloud customer experiences professionals specialized in delivering software for contact centers over the globe and increasing their revenue and response. 

Our company also provides a customized response regarding our contact center software and keeps its customers intelligent. We highlight the most demanding topic and answer smart questions in the practical world of the contact center industry.

Would you like to have one of these contact center software solutions and expand new opportunities for your business? Actually, it's easy and fast to achieve. All you need to do is to click the get the quote, fill out the form. After that our team will contact you as soon as possible.

Interested in ultimate call center software?

If your legacy business phone system doesn’t cut it anymore, replace it with modern contact center technology!

Tanya Gonchar

Expert in call center process automation, Head of Marketing at Voiptime Cloud. Interested in customer service, B2B sales, marketing, business analysis.

We use cookies to offer you a better browsing experience, analyse site traffic, personalize content, and serve targeted advertisements. Read about how we use cookies in our Privacy Notice.

Customer Contact Central