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The Department for Work and Pensions is to record and analyse insights from employees via a potential £1m contract with a specialist software provider – which will also support a pilot programme for gathering increased customer feedback.

Newly published procurement information reveals that, on 27 April, the DWP entered into an initial two-year contract with US-headquartered firm Medallia, which provides platforms through which organisations can gather and study feedback from customers or staff.

The deal covers the provision of an “employee experience” system, which will offer the DWP a “feedback-management and research platform, which includes statistical analysis, text [and] sentiment analysis and advanced reporting capabilities”.

The terms of the contract include an annual total of 600,000 pieces of employee feedback – known as “experience data records”. A core focus of these will be seeking input from new starters and those leaving the department.

But the commercial document states that the engagement covers “all employee-related experiences… [including] pre-joining, on-boarding, leavers, health and wellbeing and customised surveys”.

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Separately, the DWP has also signed a short-term deal with Medallia to provide a 12-week pilot exercise for gathering customer feedback. The £20,000 deal commenced on 6 June and runs until 26 August.

The department first indicated last summer its desire to “to understand the technology available in the market for ‘voice of the customer’ analytics software solutions”, with potential suppliers invited to attend an event.

“DWP has an ambition to better understand the experience and satisfaction levels of our customers at all key stages of their journeys across channels and in different service lines,” the invitation said. “Our need is to harness high volume and high frequency feedback that helps motivate our teams, identify broken processes and swiftly deal with specific issues.”

It added: "DWP would expect the technology to work in synergy with our operating model and customer experience strategy to support: automatic identification of calls where customers indicate they tried and failed to complete a task on their own and route this information directly to a suitable agent; analytics on call disposition (triangulated with other operational [information]) to understand why customers repeatedly call us and pinpoint which issues are unable to be resolved on the first call and how can agents be coached to handle these queries more effectively."

According to Medallia’s listing on the government’s Digital Marketplace online buying platform, its technology “captures feedback… through surveys, voice, SMS, video, [and] social media and pairs that information with operational data from platforms such as CRMs [and] HR Information Systems, then analyses those data sets with AI machine learning capabilities to identify areas for improvement and take actions”.

Data processing
The DWP will spend a little over £500,000 during the initial two-year term of the employee experience deal. Two optional one-year extensions, valued at about £235,000 each, could take the eventual worth of the deal to £974,000.

DWP is considered the data controller of information gathered the engagement; Medallia is contracted process the data – as are a number of specified sub-processors, including Amazon Web Services, which will host some data and security information, and Google, which will provider text-translation services, if required.

Also contracted as a sub-processing is Sumo Logic, which will support “diagnosis and resolution of technical issues”, and Engagehub, which will support Medallia with “routing and delivery services” for SMS text messages.

The contact indicates that a range of sensitive personal data is liable to be gathered and processed as part of the contract, employment records and contact information for individual staff members and their managers, as well as data on gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic background, disability, and caring responsibilities.

“All data processed is in aid of providing solutions for the [DWP’s] organisational employee experience,” the contact said. “To achieve this, the supplier system will be used to distribute surveys then collect, collate, store, structure, analyse and report on data within the controllers’ organisation.”

It added: “The supplier shall not view, share or export personal data to regions outside of UK without explicit permission from the controller.”