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51 New Contact Center RFP Questions
Choosing a contact center outsourcer is a huge investment. Which is, of course, why you’re willingly subjecting yourself to the time constraints and stress of writing an RFP. Need some insight? We’ve compiled a list of up-to-date contact center RFP questions to help you ensure you’re making the most informed decision. Below you’ll find six key sections of questions:
- Company overview
- Agent Hiring & Management
- Contact Center Reporting
- Project Management
- Technology
- Pricing
Company Overview
Get to know the history and organization of the vendor. You want to validate that they have the scope and stability to be a good long-term partner.
List Company Facts
- How long have you been in business?
- How many full-time employees do you have?
- How many physical centers do you operate? (List address & number of employees for each location)
- What percent of your workforce is remote/work-at-home?
- What languages do you currently support?
- What awards or recognition has your company received in the past three years?
Client Service
- What is the average length of your client relationships?
- Name your three largest clients, and list how long they have been clients.
- What percent of total annual revenue comes from your two largest clients?
- Do you serve any clients who would be considered a competitor of our company?
Culture
- Describe your corporate culture including how it is differentiated from your competition.
- Define your mission statement and company values.
- How does your corporate culture align with your understanding of our own company, values, and culture?
- What strategies have you deployed to maintain and nurture your culture with a mix of on-premises, remote, and/or hybrid employees?
- Describe your initiatives regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion within your organization. Detail roles and responsibilities, policies, and measurements.
- Provide any relevant ESG certification, rankings, or third-party verification.
Agent Hiring & Management
An outsourcer’s ability to attract and retain the right people for your brand and your service requirements is essential.
Labor Market
- Describe your primary labor market including post-secondary education rates and unemployment rates. What percentage of your employees live within an hour of your primary market?
- Describe your company’s competitive differentiators within your labor market.
- Outline your attraction and recruitment strategies, processes, and success measurements, including results for hiring for the past 12 months.
Agent Training
- Describe your training structure (team, facilities, Learning Management Systems, remote platforms, etc.) and outline your approach to new hire training.
- What is unique about your agent training regimen?
- What’s your maximum class training size for in-person training? For remote training?
- What percentage of new hires graduate from training to production?
- What percentage of agents are still with the company six months after graduating from training?
- How have you evolved your training program to accommodate remote and/or hybrid work environments?
- How do your success ratios differ in remote/hybrid work circumstances versus on-premises training?
- What ongoing developmental or career development training do you offer?
Agent Engagement
- What is your annual agent attrition rate companywide (list both voluntary and involuntary turnover numbers)?
- What are the attrition rates for the program that most resemble our requirements?
- Describe your employee engagement strategies and measurement processes. Provide detail on employee engagement results, companywide, for the past three years and for the program that most closely resembles our requirements in size and scope for the past 12 months.
- How have your employee engagement strategies evolved to support remote and/or hybrid work environments?
- What percentage of your new hires comes from employee referrals?
- What is your average tenure of salaried staff? Hourly staff?
Agent Profile
- How do you profile your agents and assess their skills?
- What percent of agents have some post-secondary education?
Contact Center Reporting
Your contact center can collect a wealth of data about your business, your customers’ behavior, your marketing results, and more. The right contact center RFP questions can reveal who in the competition can go beyond reporting just on standard call metrics (AHT, ASA, first call resolution, and conversion rates) and provide high-level measurements. Premier contact centers should equip you with business insight and analysis that will help you make informed business decisions.
Capabilities and Experience in Information Services
- Describe your information services team including number of personnel, specializations.
- Provide an example of how you have used reporting to positively impact a client’s business.
- Do you offer conversational intelligence as a standard offering to clients? If yes, provide details on the platform, available insights, and reporting standards.
- What reports form the foundation of your quarterly business reviews?
- Who on your management team reviews client reports on a regular basis?
Reporting Customization and Client Access
- What custom reporting capabilities do you have?
- How do your clients access reporting in real-time or near real-time?
- Provide examples of standard and custom reporting.
Project Management
Your internal operations team will need to interface with the vendor if they are chosen. For your benefit, you want to make sure that you have access to the right makeup of vendor project management resources to ensure they sync up with your internal team.
Team Commitment
- What percentage of the project manager(s)’s time will be dedicated to our project?
- Provide an organization chart and bios of senior leadership and program management resources who could be assigned to our program.
- What members of senior management are located on the same site as the location proposed for our program?
- Describe your governance model including details on senior management involvement on our account.
- What differentiators have contributed to your successful strategic partnerships and what gaps or barriers were contributing factors in your least successful?
Again, think about what’s important to you. For example, if your incumbent vendor has poor service or project management, you’ll want to make sure you’re covered here. And on the flipside, if you’re a first-time outsourcer, you’ll want to mirror your internal operations/project management with that of your outsourced vendor.
Technology
The last thing you want is a vendor with out-of-date call center technology—and yes, that means you should start asking about AI.
List out which technologies you are bringing to the table (especially your CRM or CTI platform) and be specific in how you’d like the vendor to integrate with those tools. And be realistic about your risk tolerance. Dual redundancy might be ideal, but prepare to pay for it. If the vendor is expected to bolt onto your platform, indicate that in the contact center RFP.
Tech Compatibility
- Describe your experience integrating with the telephony and CRM/CTI systems described in our requirements.
- Detail your business continuity plans and redundancy practices.
- How do you support the remote and/or hybrid environment from a technology perspective?
- What options do you provide to clients for program-specific redundancy or contingency plans? (Provide details on which options are included in your pricing model.)
- Detail your ability to pivot from an in-office solution to a primarily remote solution and vice versa from a technology perspective.
AI
- Describe your current AI capabilities and services.
- How long have you been delivering AI solutions as part of your contact center services?
- If you are using conversational intelligence, describe the implementation, ingestion, and insight timeline for a new client. How long will it take for a new client to benefit from the machine-learning attributes of your system?
- What KPIs/metrics do you measure in tracking the effectiveness of your escalations from AI to live agents?
- What IT resources can you provide to support the migration and integration of AI into our customer service solutions?
- How do you measure the impact and effectiveness of your AI strategy?
- What steps do you take when outcomes of your AI strategy are falling short of expectations?
- What similar projects are you currently using AI technology for? What results have you seen?
Pricing
Keep in mind that every contact center prices their services differently. For this reason, you will benefit by providing specific scenarios (i.e. call volume) using the economic model you prefer, such as cost per call, cost per minute, cost per headcount, etc.
Pricing Models
- Detail one-time costs associated with startup.
- What is the estimated annual cost of the solution detailed in your proposal?
- Detail your pricing model by channel using the volumes and SLAs provided in this RFP.
- What services and features are included in this pricing? Include team/project management resources as well as technology and reporting.
- What performance guarantees are included in this pricing?
- Are there any volume discounts you can provide?
- Are licensing costs for all required platforms such as your conversational intelligence platform, and/or your telephony platform included? If not, please detail how direct costs are billed.
- Describe any risk/reward bonus-penalty structure you offer.
- If you were to suggest an alternative pricing model within the same volume parameters as the scenario provided, what would you suggest?
Being able to accurately compare one bidder’s offering to another is the key here – how the bidder reached the number they are presenting is as important as the number itself. Always ask for a breakdown of their pricing and note features and services that one vendor may offer over another. As much as possible, you want an “apples-to-apples” comparison so you can make an accurate, fair evaluation.
Writing Your Contact Center RFP Questions
You’ve caught us—we’ve provided a little more than 51 contact center RFP questions. That’s because we’re committed to keeping this list up to date as market demands change. We recommend customizing this list as you see fit to meet your unique needs and requirements.
No matter where you’re at in the procurement process, we’ve got your back. Make headway in your RFP journey—just click here to request pricing and more info today.
