Description
The VA, Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Product Engineering (PE), Veteran Experience Services (VES), Veterans Relationship Management (VRM) requires a SaaS license to an Employee Experience (EX) tool to collect, analyze and act upon experience data in real-time to drive deeper understanding of the transactional and relational experience between the VA and the Veterans it serves. The proprietary Medallia VOE purchase will provide VA with an Enterprisewide subscription and will integrate seamlessly with the Medallia SaaS Customer Experience Management (CEM) tool leveraged Department-wide at VA, operating as Veterans Signals (VSignals). VSignals supports the Veteran Experience Office’s (VEO) and OIT’s Veteran experience improvement initiatives on behalf of the Secretary of Veteran Affairs (SECVA). The EX tool will combine the employee data set with the existing Veterans experience data to present a holistic view of experience drivers; collect employee feedback through an omni-channel approach with the ability to integrate with pre-existing operational data sets connected with the VA employee; automatically update multi-level hierarchies while projects are in process with no user intervention; handle complex sampling allocation across programs including weighting allocations by program and adjusting prioritization during execution; integrate with current VA operational platforms to include Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) and existing integrations supporting Veterans experience; engage with, collect feedback from, analyze alongside operational metrics and ultimately take action on VA’s employee feedback data; display a series of reports showing number of logins by team, region or other defined segment alongside feedback data; leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze in real time three (3) levels of topics with up to 10,000,000 topics at each level; run a regression alongside NLP with each topic to identify which topics have the biggest impact on a desired metric; convert raw audio files to text files for ingestion into NLP engines; display journey analytics capabilities to bring together disparate data sources leveraging email, unique IDs, internet cookies and other identifiers to build cohort segments and view their journey end to end. The period of performance is 12-month base period and two 12-month option periods. Based on market research, the Government has determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for the required Medallia VOE Enterprise wide SaaS subscription. VA implemented the VSignals Medallia CEM, a SaaS tool, in 2016. The Medallia CEM, operating as VSignals, is currently implemented in all Veterans Health Administration, Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), National Cemetery Administration (NCA), and Board of Veterans Appeals (BVA) offices in support of the VEO and OIT’s Veteran experience improvement initiatives. Medallia VOE is the only SaaS that can integrate with the existing VSignals Medallia CEM. No other EX software providing this functionality is interoperable and compatible with VSignals Medallia. Using another manufacturer’s application would require extensive reconfiguration to include a complete replacement of the Medallia infrastructure in place. Due to the Medallia proprietary source code, no other brand name EX SaaS can interoperate with the existing Medallia infrastructure. Replacing the existing infrastructure would result in estimated duplicative costs of approximately $10M which would not be recovered through competition, and a period of 16 months to reconstitute a new CEM tool. These estimates are based on previous acquisition history and comparable configuration and development efforts of similar sizes. In addition, only the Medallia’s EX tool can integrate and leverage the historical data sets. Standing up a EX program of this magnitude from scratch and incorporating Medallia’s stored data and continuous collection of data related to EX, would take additional multiple years and a significantly larger investment than leveraging already current platform infrastructure, data flows, and user familiarity. VOE has an exclusive embedded and managed integration directly into Medallia's Experience Cloud (MEC) AI and Machine Learning Text Analytics engine. This means the VA will be able to take advantage of the existing Text Analytic topic sets developed over the past six years under the VSignals program. Without procurement of this required tool, VA’s ability to further build upon its existing capabilities would not be possible and would negatively impact ability to provide greater level of care.