Environment Agency to spend up to £25m on outsourced contact centre

The centre will be used as a multimedia communications hub

The UK's Environment Agency is looking to outsource a multimedia contact centre service that provides the public with extensive flood risk information and advice.

An online tender says that the outsourcing deal will last four years and be worth up to £25m.

The fully outsourced contact centre will include a live agent call centre and "interactive communication media", including interactive voice response, SMS and instant messaging.

The tender highlights that the live agent call centre network must be able to cope with call volumes that are similar to those provided by the emergency services, which can exceed 1,000 calls per hour.

In addition to the floodline service, the contact centre may also be made available to other government departments or contracting authorities to use in order to provide similar incident management and advice services that require call centre and multimedia communication provision.

The Environment Agency also recently tendered for a Water and Environment Management Framework that is set cost £1bn to implement, £48m of which will be spent on mapping, modelling and data services to enable flood and coastal risk management.