TTS announces additional call center efforts

In the closing days of October, the General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Services added two new contact center modernization efforts to its Centers of Excellence initiative.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Library of Congress Copyright Office’s Public Information and Education Office both tapped TTS’ CoE program to support their contact center modernization work.

TTS and the Public Information and Education Office said in an Oct. 30 statement they partnered through the CoE to modernize the latter agency's call center service delivery and technologies. The center handles public calls about copyright registration, procedures and other topics.

A few days earlier, TTS and HUD announced a new contract with service provider Leidos that would push the implementation of HUD's call center CoE effort from an initial discovery phase to an actual solution implementation.

In the request for quotes (RFQ) posted on GitHub in early October, TTS said HUD had five fragmented call center contracts spread across 65 offices with almost 40 “shadow” 1-800 call-in lines that didn’t have specific contact center support, as well as splintered call center solutions that had no relation to one another.

TTS said replacing the disparate infrastructure with a centralized, outsourced solution made the most sense for operations.

It said a new “HUDCentral” enterprise-wide, centralized, omni-channel solution supported by a system of common technologies and a customer relationship management system would provide more coherent call response, as well as a way to provide uniform live chat, text messaging, chat bot and intelligent voice recognition services.

HUD became the second host agency for TTS’ CoE efforts in 2018, just behind the Department of Agriculture. HUD implemented an initial development phase for the CoE efforts, which it said would identify the areas where modernization could help.

In June, HUD awarded contracts to begin the implementation phase of cloud adoption and customer experience CoEs with Systems Engineering Solutions and Booz Allen Hamilton.