After leaving citizens on hold for 798 years, UK tax authority has £1B for CRM upgrade

HMRC kicks off procurement to modernize customer service after scathing reports

The UK's tax collector plans to appoint a new CRM vendor to manage its vast interactions with citizens over their tax affairs.

His Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has published a "preliminary market engagement notice" to scope out suppliers to provide a software-as-a-service CRM platform.

A procurement notice said HMRC was looking for a "core CRM SaaS Platform" including "registration, subscription and customer record management capabilities."

The package would include identity, verification, access, and fraud software as a service, secure digital exchange including document storage, and architecture and product technical support.

"These capabilities are intended to form the backbone of HMRC's customer management capabilities, and will be made available to tax regimes in priority order," the notice said. "The new CRM system will be required to seamlessly integrate with updated customer service platforms, including the future Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) which will also be procured in 2025, directly enhancing taxpayer interactions, streamlining services, and reducing administrative burdens."

HMRC has now launched the preliminary market engagement for the CCaaS, earmarking a value of up to £500 million ($670 million) for the contract.

A £1 billion ($1.34 billion) budget might seem a lot for a CRM system, but that's just for the software – in a contract set to last up to 15 years. As well as CRM, HMRC said it would launch a competition for an implementation partner once it has picked its vendor.

It said it expects the formal competition for the CRM platform to start in June, when it publishes the tender notice.

Maybe a new CRM platform will not come soon enough for UK taxpayers. Earlier this year, a committee of MPs said the current systems were so bad that it made cuts to the phone service to try to push users online.

Parliament's Public Accounts Committee found that during the 2023-24 financial year, the HMRC phone service's performance reached an all-time low.

In the first 11 months of the year, it cut off nearly 44,000 customers who had been waiting 70 minutes to speak to an adviser because its system could not cope with demand. Only two-thirds of calls were answered, and the average wait time was more than 23 minutes.

An earlier report from the National Audit Office (NAO), a spending watchdog, found that customers phoning in with inquiries were collectively left on hold for 798 years in fiscal 2023.

The NAO found the time spent waiting in the 12 months to March last year was more than double the time wasted in fiscal 2020. It said digital channels intended to ease service pressures didn't help as expected.

It was unclear how significantly and quickly digital channels would reduce demand for telephone and correspondence services, the NAO said. ®