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Industry: Travel & Hospitality
Function: Indirect Procurement
Goal: Select the right strategic partner and minimise risk
How we helped the UK’s leading train travel information service evaluate and renegotiate its strategic partnership in the face of a rapidly transforming customer landscape.
Departure Time
Our client, the UK’s leading provider of train travel information services, is responsible to the train operating companies (TOCs) and the public purse for tightly budgeted service delivery and regulated adherence to high performance customer experience targets. A wide range of information and customer support services is outsourced to a number of key Vendors managed by our Client’s small team of channel development, commercial, operational and vendor management specialists.
Live voice information support and back office customer relations services were being provided by a single Vendor with operations split across two offshore sites. The contract had spanned a period of immense change that saw the reduction in live voice demand from more than 60 million calls a year to 4 million and still falling, as self service and mobile technologies drove exponentially increased overall service demand and raised customer expectations. Conversely, AHT had increased substantially due to the greater complexity of calls that could not be resolved by self service and mobile channels. This had impacted many aspects of the operation and also the commercial structure, resulting in the need for significant process and management change and renegotiation of pricing on more than one occasion.
The incumbent Vendor, having successfully retained the contract through a number of extensions, had a strong working relationship with the Client team but, having recently been acquired by a much larger organisation with ambitious growth plans, now presented our Client with risk. Further contract extension was not possible within the terms of the original Contract. The necessity to retender presented our Client with the opportunity for a major review of all strategic and operational aspects of the requirement and access via OJEU’s open tendering process to the global marketplace of potential new partners.
Travelling Together
With 15 months to go before the expiring contract lapsed, Envisago was engaged to provide expert resource to support procurement of the new contract, enabling our Client’s core team to maintain full focus on business as usual in this dynamic and volatile environment. For a period of nine months, Envisago became part of the Client’s team to manage a robust and auditable retendering process and provide best practice advice to help shape the right outcome for all stakeholders.
Pragmatic and sensitive to multiple stakeholder expectations throughout, Envisago managed the end to end OJEU-compliant process, including: publication of the OJEU Notice; drafting the Statement of Requirements and RFP documentation; development and management of the weighted Evaluation Criteria and scoring framework enabling objective, evidence-based evaluation of participating Vendors in line with our Client’s strategic and operational needs; management of Vendor questions; ensuring that the shortlisted Vendor offshore Site Assessments effectively validated the Vendor’s claimed capabilities and experience; re-drafting of the Statement of Work Contract Schedules to reflect a number of key changes and enhancements; management of candidate and other stakeholder expectations and provision of feedback to the unsuccessful candidates. Envisago also advised on enhancements to the operational performance management suite of metrics, contract schedules and pricing and incentives framework and provided support during the Contract negotiations, helping both Client and Vendor minimise risk.
A Safe Arrival
Through a robust, objective vendor selection and engagement process our Client was confident in entering into a new contract with the incumbent Vendor, minimising risk and with terms that better reflected and accommodated current and future service requirements and customer behaviours. The new Contract was designed to facilitate high performance, effectively accommodate the impacts of continuing reduction in voice demand and increasing AHT and be more resilient in the face of other changes in the customer management environment. Perhaps most importantly, the redesigned contract was to better facilitate a more objective and collaborative Client/Vendor relationship focused on high operational performance.