Set evaluation criteria before a contact center RFP

A contact center RFP often shows up on your desk days before procurement wants the template filled in. The person who sent it, usually a service sponsor, may not have talked yet to the teams who will run the new workflow once a vendor is picked. If you answer the template as written, you hand procurement a document built on guesses nobody tested. Pausing for one short conversation about evaluation criteria changes the outcome of the whole deal, and it costs you almost nothing compared to the cost of losing a deal later because the wrong people signed off.

Why this conversation goes wrong

Sponsors feel time pressure the moment procurement sets a deadline. They want to hand over a completed document, not open a debate about who gets a vote. So they answer the RFP alone, using whatever criteria feel obvious to them, and they skip the operations staff who actually handle the calls, the chats, and the transfers every day. That gap shows up later. A finance leader might care about cost per contact. A frontline supervisor might care about how many clicks an agent needs to resolve a password reset. If nobody reconciles those views before the document goes out, the vendor selection turns into a fight after the fact, often after contracts are close to signed. An account executive who lets this happen ends up defending a proposal against criteria that shifted midway through the process. Slowing the sponsor down before the document ships is not obstruction. It protects the sponsor from a selection that falls apart in front of their own leadership.

How to prepare before that call

Do not walk into this conversation empty handed. Bring three questions and be ready to write down the answers in front of the sponsor.

1. Which contact types create the most pressure on the team right now, meaning the calls or chats that generate repeat handling, long hold times, or complaints.
2. Which teams will live with the new workflow once it ships, not just the team that requested the change.
3. What evidence would convince the people who approve the scorecard that one vendor approach belongs in the next round.

Sketch a one page draft before the meeting, with four columns. Label them contact type, decision, evidence, and owner. Leave it half finished. A blank page invites a sponsor to say they will fill it out later. A half finished page gives them something to react to, and reacting is easier than generating criteria from nothing. This is the same instinct behind leading a workshop on self service optionswhere showing up with a rough draft of the current state gets a room talking faster than an open ended question does.

What to say to the sponsor

Elena, the service sponsor, opens with the deadline. "Procurement needs our answers by Friday. They already have a template, so we just need to fill in the boxes."

David does not argue with the deadline. He agrees to help and asks one question before touching the template. "We can get the template filled out well before Friday. Before we do, I want to understand how your team will score the answers once they come in. Which contact types are creating the most pressure right now."

Elena thinks about it and says address changes and payment questions generate repeated transfers, and agents keep escalating the same handful of issues to supervisors. David follows with the ownership question. "Who on your side can describe those handoffs in detail, and who signs off on the final scorecard."

She names three groups, operations, digital service, and procurement. David proposes a fix that costs an hour, not a week. "Let us set up one short working session with those three groups before the template goes out. We will map the current handoffs, list the evidence each group needs to trust a new approach, and flag anything that needs a technical review before procurement sees it." Elena agrees, and the Friday deadline stays intact because the working session takes less time than rewriting the scorecard twice after submission.

Mistakes that sink the evaluation criteria

Answering the template before asking who reads it is the most common mistake. The document looks finished, but it reflects one person's view of the problem, and it will not survive contact with the people who actually run the service. A second mistake is treating a feature list as a substitute for a plan tied to real contact types. Vendors love feature checklists because everyone scores well on them. They tell a sponsor almost nothing about whether the approach fixes the address change transfers or the payment question escalations that are actually costing the team time. A third mistake is skipping the ownership question. If nobody names who approves the scorecard, the criteria change after the fact, usually when someone senior reads the finalists and objects to a priority they were never asked about. A fourth mistake is treating this as a one time conversation. Operations priorities shift, so a scorecard built in one quarter needs a quick check before it locks in for the final decision.

Practicing and scoring this conversation

A manager coaching a new account executive should build a scenario where the sponsor is under deadline pressure and wants to skip straight to the template. Give the coach a script that keeps pushing toward the deadline unless the representative asks about contact types, ownership, and evidence before offering to help. Score the representative on whether they name a specific next step, such as a short working session, rather than a vague offer to "collaborate." A representative who agrees to fill in the template without asking who scores it has failed the exercise even if they hit the deadline.

Rehearsing this with an AI counterpart works better than reading through a checklist alone, because the pressure to just answer the questions feels real when someone across the table is pushing a deadline at you. Contact Centers practice conversations run this exact scenario, along with related ones like getting operations leaders into a review before a proposal goes out. If your team is also weighing new reporting tools alongside the RFP, it helps to explore supervisor workload before proposing new dashboards so the evaluation criteria account for what supervisors can realistically absorb.

Closing the loop

An RFP moves fast, but a scorecard built by one rushed sponsor moves faster than the operations team can absorb it. Ask for the three answers before you touch the template, and the Friday deadline still gets met, just with criteria that survive the final review. DealSpeak exists to make that first conversation feel familiar before you have it for real.