D -- CMS contact center customer service activities

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is seeking capability statements from small and minority business firms who are qualified to support CMS contact center customer service-related activities, particularly for Medicare beneficiaries. CMS intends to operate several contact centers (to be called Beneficiary Contact Centers (BCCs)) that are accessed by a single toll-free telephone number (1-800-Medicare) and utilize a network Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, a standard desktop application, a national data warehouse, and centralized standards and approaches to core contact center functions, i.e. operating policies and procedures, quality assurance, training development, and content development, among others. The BCCs will respond to general Medicare inquiries as well as inquiries about Medicare claims and services. Besides responding to inquiries by telephone, the BCCs will also respond to written inquiries, including email and Webchat. In addition to (1) contact center operations (responding timely, accurately, and reliably to telephone and written inquiries, including mailroom operations, disenrollment transactions, and beneficiary access to personal information on the Web), CMS is seeking sources to perform in the following functional areas: (2) system integration (enhancing interoperability between diverse systems, such as a standardized desktop, national data warehouse, quality monitoring application and applications services management), (3) software development (developing and maintaining a standardized desktop and a national data warehouse), (4) performance management (measuring or increasing performance through training development, train-the-trainer delivery, content development, scripting development, development of standard operating procedures, national quality assurance, beneficiary satisfaction measurement, and qualitative performance metrics analysis; this also includes designing and maintaining a website for contact center users containing operating procedures, training materials, frequently asked questions, quality assurance information and other information needed to communicate to contact centers), (5) operations management (monitoring, managing, and reporting on network oversight, including a network operations center (call allocation changes, reporting, forecasting, scheduling, helpdesk)), and (6) print fulfillment (packaging and mailing static items and printing, packaging, and mailing print on demand items.) Additional functions may be developed in the future to address the changing priorities of the Medicare program, evolving technology, and new customer expectations. Workload: Between October 1, 2003, and September 30, 2004, (Federal Fiscal Year 2004), Medicare call centers handled almost 30 million beneficiary telephone calls, including general inquiries and claims inquiries. Projected Medicare beneficiary telephone inquiries for Fiscal Year 2005 are 38 million. Written inquiries received from beneficiaries in Fiscal Year 2004 exceeded 838,000. Projected written inquiries for Fiscal Year 2005 are 1 million. Workload for print fulfillment includes both static items and print on demand (POD.) Static items include Medicare & You, and other preprinted handbook and brochure type items. POD items include geographic-specific information about nursing homes, managed care plans, prescription drug cards and prescription drug plans. The Medicare print fulfillment contractor mailed over 860,000 static items in Fiscal Year 2004 and over 1 million POD items. Projections for print fulfillment are not available for Fiscal Year 2005, but volumes for both static and print on demand can expect to be higher. Performance Expectations - Contact Center Operations: CMS expects that companies winning contact center operations contracts shall be able to handle - to 1/3 of the total estimated call volume (38 million in FY 05) and shall also be able to ramp staffing up and down to handle the call spikes that have become commonplace for Medicare beneficiary call centers. These spikes are in response to predictable CMS information campaigns, but also to news stories, press releases, breaking news, or other situations over which CMS has no control. In some spikes, call volumes have exceeded 400,000 calls per day. On average, regular weekday call volume exceeds 80,000. In addition to the ability to handle unpredictable call spikes, contractors shall be expected to answer, as measured on a monthly basis, at least 80% of calls within 30 seconds with an abandonment rate no greater than 4%. Companies shall also have the capability to operate 24 hours/day x 7 days/week. For written inquiries, companies shall be expected to respond to 95% of written inquiries within 3 business days. For both telephone and written inquiries, quality and satisfaction measures will need to meet or exceed 95% on CMS-provided quality monitoring and satisfaction tools. Performance Expectations - Print Fulfillment: CMS expects that one company will win a print fulfillment contract. This company shall have the ability to mail 95% of static and POD materials within 3 business days of request and ensure that 95% of all orders are accurate and complete. Some requests will come in directly through telephone conversations with customer service representatives or through www.Medicare.gov, while some will need to be transcribed from IVR requests. The company shall be able to maintain and store approximately 1 year's worth of static publications (in excess of 800,000) and shall be able to generate and fulfill up to 6,000 POD requests per day. For the POD function, CMS expects that the company will use an end-to-end custom book-building program which can automatically assemble specific XML data, gathered and created by the various Medicare decision tools (on www.Medicare.gov), and build on-demand personalized health care documents to be mailed directly to each requestor. The POD program shall be designed to be easily scalable to an unlimited (and growing) number of daily individual requests / orders. Additional Performance Expectations: Companies winning contracts can expect to be held accountable for meeting further performance standards for contact center operations and print fulfillment as well as specific performance standards developed for the other functional areas mentioned above. Cost Efficiencies: Companies shall be expected to provide service at a competitive price within the full spectrum of the contact center delivery market, while maintaining quality standards and satisfaction levels. While small businesses interested in documenting their capability to perform in any or all of the functional areas above should respond to this sources sought announcement within 15 days of its publication, we are particularly interested in small business capabilities in the area of qualitative and quantitative performance (e.g., training, content, scripting, quality assurance, beneficiary satisfaction, standard operating procedures, etc.) The following specific information is requested: (a) company descriptive literature; (b) specific related corporate experience broken down by the functional areas mentioned above as applicable; (c) experience with meeting performance metrics and expectations, including information about the metrics met in previous or current contracts, and experience with the type of performance expectations mentioned above; (d) information about efficiencies in answering telephone and written inquiries (i.e., cost per minute experienced in previous contracts); (e) references (to include a point of contact and phone number)with first hand knowledge of the experience cited in (b), (c), and (d) above; and (f) an indication of whether the services to support such activities are customarily available in the commercial market and if so what are the customary practices, including pricing, discounts, warranties, etc. under which commercial sales of these services are made. If applicable, indicate if your company is on a GSA schedule or holds a Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) relevant to the capabilities addressed in your response. It is essential that the contractor be free of all appearance of or actual conflicts, such as the operation or sale of managed care plans and/or prescription drug plans, Medigap policies, durable medical equipment, dialysis services or any other related product or service. Specifically, the contractor must not have any relationships or arrangements through its business operations or its employees that could be considered as possibly lessening the company's objectivity concerning any aspect of the referrals or information provided to the Medicare beneficiaries. If such relationships or arrangements exist, contractors shall be required, during the procurement process, to identify potential conflicts of interest and discuss how the conflicts will be addressed and mitigated. Specify the name and telephone number of a point of contact and indicate your size standard under the following North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) (formerly known as the SIC code): 561421 - Telephone Call Centers (Size Standard: $6 million); 541512 - Systems Integration (Size Standard: $21 million); 541511 - Software Development (Size Standard - $21 million); 611430 - Training (Size Standard - $6 million); 541611 - Administrative Management and General Consulting Services (Size Standard - $6 million); 541511 - Web design (Size Standard - $21 million); 493190 - Fulfillment (Size Standard - $21.5 million); and, 323115 - Print on Demand (Size Standard - 500 employees). Additional information on NAICS codes can be found at www.sba.gov. The purpose of this synopsis is to identify potential responsible small business sources only, does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP), and is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government. The information that you provide will be evaluated to identify capable potential sources if funding is allocated for this effort. The Government does not intend to award a contract on the basis of this notice or otherwise pay for any information solicited. Documentation should be sent to: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Attn: Debbie Lester, Room C2-21-15, 7500 Security Blvd, Baltimore, MD 21244. Questions may be referred to Debbie Lester at 410-786-5136.