Skip to main content

Beta Help us improve the Digital Marketplace - send your feedback

Civica UK Limited

Civica Taskbot Chat Framework Service

Provides a series of Microsoft Bot Framework extensions enabling rapid deployment of task conversational Chatbot applications. In-depth expertise in Microsoft LUIS and a wide range of API-based integration technologies enables conversational designs to scale for all Chatbot deployments with bespoke NLP and intent mapping where required.

Features

  • Based on Microsoft Azure Bot Framework
  • Bot solutions use Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs to determine intent
  • Bots use conversational AI passing all user requests through LUIS
  • Interactions between an orchestrator Bot and multiple skilled Bots
  • Bots integrate with many channels e.g., Facebook Messenger, Skype, email
  • Bots integrate with standard API technologies and various business systems
  • Bots can detect when to pass conversations on an agent
  • Enhanced logging and reporting features available`
  • GDPR privacy by design and DPIAs used where appropriate
  • Civica’s Conversation Experience Module suggestions to refine and enhance content

Benefits

  • Automates the execution of mundane, repetitive tasks
  • Reduces cost to serve by freeing-up employees for other tasks
  • Quickly actions users’ requests without the need for a call
  • Improves customer experience
  • Increases digital engagement, driving channel shift
  • Accessible 24 x 7, across multiple channels
  • Proven framework providing rapid, scalable deployment of conversational Bot services
  • Accessing data from back-end systems enriches conversations to achieve goals
  • GDPR compliance where Bots are required to process personal data
  • Reduced time to develop and improve effectiveness of Q&A pairs

Pricing

£138 to £2,290 a unit a day

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at g-cloud@civica.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

2 3 9 2 7 9 5 1 9 7 5 3 9 0 1

Contact

Civica UK Limited Civica UK Limited
Telephone: +44 (0) 3333 214 914
Email: g-cloud@civica.co.uk

Planning

Planning service
Yes
How the planning service works
The Civica Delivery Manager (DM) utilises a proactive ‘Agile’ approach to planning the implementation of cloud hosting or software services. Civica’s approach to delivering the service is as follows: During initiation the DM will meet with the customer team and undertake desk study and research to: Identify - scope, terms of reference, roles and responsibilities, environment, outcomes, checkpoints, timescales, constraints, issues and risks. The outputs are combined with Civica’s knowledge and experience of planning the implementation of cloud hosting or software services across 2,000 major customers. This ensures that Civica’s planning service takes into consideration all factors and they are assessed, planned for and recorded. Manage - regular project reviews compare progress against the plan with any issues or risks identified and mitigating actions monitored. This iterative approach ensures emerging issues are incorporated into the plan and that progress is maintained across all elements of the plan. Realise - the plan is managed through to project completion to ensure the benefits of the cloud hosting or software services are realised. Lessons Learnt are fed back to the customer and future planning service projects.
Planning service works with specific services
No

Training

Training service provided
Yes
How the training service works
Civica provides a complete Training Service for its cloud software and support services. The training services available include formal training, collaborative knowledge sharing and in-project skills transfer. Training approach and services are based on customer needs and delivered to an agreed budget and timescale. Training Services are priced from the SFIA rate card. Training can be structured to address different levels of need including, for example: 1) Cloud Awareness for Executives, Managers and Business Managers. Provides an overview of features, benefits, risks and implications of a Cloud based strategy; 2) Cloud Induction Training for system administrators. Provides essential skills to run cloud services and orientation to support materials; 3) Cloud Standard Training in the core services for system champions and end users. Covers system administration, security and cloud service monitoring/managing; 4) Cloud Specialist Training – advanced training for system champions. This may involve Accredited Courses from Civica Cloud delivery partners; 5) Cloud Training Packages, tailored package of training system administrators, business managers, and end users. We promote and facilitate skills transfer throughout engagement, including access to Civica Knowledge Sharing events and activities including supplier briefings and Webinars.
Training is tied to specific services
No

Setup and migration

Setup or migration service available
Yes
How the setup or migration service works
Civica’s proven five step process supports organisations migrating workload to the cloud or transitioning between cloud providers. Cloud Strategy: understand your challenges and desired outcomes from moving to the cloud. We generate a cloud roadmap aligned to meeting your business, technology and operating model needs. Discover and Assess: we engage with your stakeholders to determine the current application, organisation and service status, collating existing data on assets and services and combining tool-based and manual exploration to uncover dependencies, constraints and opportunities. Analyse and Design: we collaboratively define a target cloud model incorporating governance, security, resilience and flexibility to meet your needs. Technology blueprint produced and a prioritised and phased migration plan to achieve the desired benefits ensuring that it fits with people, process, tooling & service needs. Migrate and Transform: execute the plan, establishing governance and access controls, provisioning right-sized cloud instances and services and incrementally delivery of migration of service, systems and data. Where appropriate we use repeatable, software and template driven provisioning and configuration to ensure consistency, efficiency and security. Manage and Optimise: monitor and manage the transformed services to ensure planned benefits are delivered. Refine configuration and implementation based on experience to deliver a successful cloud migration.
Setup or migration service is for specific cloud services
No

Quality assurance and performance testing

Quality assurance and performance testing service
Yes
How the quality assurance and performance testing works
At Civica, the goal of quality assurance is not to give testing (including performance) its own phase but to embed quality across each of the phases for setup and migration. Discovery and Calibration – comprehension of requirements, data, environments and effort into test approaches and plans that underpin and steer the testing work. Collate current and desired performance, load and concurrency metrics including different use profiles (for example, for spike and soak testing). Identify tools appropriate to the project (such as JMeter) to aid testing Optimisation/Migration – working closely with the migration phases, verification points are identified (to isolate issues as soon as they arise), and test cases/charters are formed around these points. For performance testing, create automated scripts to simulate use of the system through realistic and edge case scenarios. Validation – execute the test cases and/or perform session based exploratory testing against the test charters. Run performance tests with different parameters to simulate varying loads and use profiles. Use visualisations to compare trends. Collaborate proactively on defects as they arise. Deployment – the testing balance shifts from defect identification to acceptance testing (user and operational OAT). Regression suites are created to support future changes.

Security testing

Security services
Yes
Security services type
  • Security strategy
  • Security design
  • Security testing
Certified security testers
No

Ongoing support

Ongoing support service
Yes
Types of service supported
  • Buyer hosting or software
  • Hosting or software provided by your organisation
  • Hosting or software provided by a third-party organisation
How the support service works
Civica delivers an ITIL®-aligned Service underpinned by a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) covering the whole spectrum of cloud support service activities, all tailored to your own specific requirements.
The Service includes 2nd & 3rd Level Support, Incident and Problem management, operational management and maintenance through to ongoing development and improvement.
By delivering a Service with a focus on continuous improvement, Civica is able to ensure optimal levels of performance, availability and security.
We provide a Service Delivery Manager (SDM) who manages the delivery of your Service, is available to all key stakeholders and is your 1st point of escalation.
The SDM will work with you from the outset of the engagement to ensure the Service Transition is defined, planned and delivered seamlessly whilst also ensuring that the live Service continues to meet your needs and is appropriately documented.
The SDM will also provide monthly service reporting, attend quarterly Service Reviews and facilitate an annual customer satisfaction survey.
Responses to Change Requests and proposals for Service extensions are all included as part of the Service delivered.

Service scope

Service constraints
None

User support

Email or online ticketing support
Email or online ticketing
Support response times
Civica offers four levels of support ranging from core working hours (9am to 5pm Monday to Friday excluding English public holidays) to full 24x7 support. Our Silver service response times depend on the severity of the incident and are as follows:
a) Severity Level 1 (Critical) - 1 hour to respond, 1 day to resolve.
b) Severity Level 2 (Severe) - 1 hour to respond, 3 days to resolve.
c) Severity Level 3 (Disruptive) - 2 hours to respond, reasonable 5 days to resolve.
d) Severity Level 4 (Minor) - 2 hours to respond, reasonable efforts to resolve.
User can manage status and priority of support tickets
No
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
Web chat support
No
Support levels
Civica offers four levels of support with the following support hours:
1) Platinum: Full 24*7 support service suitable for the most business critical applications.
2) Gold: On-call 24*7 support service appropriate for public facing applications that are utilised 24*7.
3) Silver: 8am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays. This extended hours model is targeted at customers requiring cover for a flexible working day.
4) Bronze: 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday excluding public holidays.
The Civica Digital Service Desk is contactable from 8am to 6pm on UK working days.
The Service Desk responds to questions depending on the Severity Level of the call as follows:
a) Severity Level 1 (Critical) - the reported problem causes a halt to the client’s core business processes and no workaround is available.
b) Severity Level 2 (Major) - the reported problem causes degradation of the client’s core business processes and no reasonable work-around exists.
c) Severity Level 3 (Intermediate) - the reported problem impacts the client’s operational environment, but does not affect core business processes. A work-around is available.
d) Severity Level 4 (Minor) - a non-critical problem is causing some disruption, but with little or no impact on the client operation.

Resellers

Supplier type
Reseller providing extra features and support
Organisation whose services are being resold
Resell Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and UKCloud and support others

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Other security clearance
Government security clearance
Up to Security Clearance (SC)

Standards and certifications

ISO/IEC 27001 certification
Yes
Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001
Alcumus ISOQAR
ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
09/11/2020
What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
N/A
ISO 28000:2007 certification
No
CSA STAR certification
No
PCI certification
No
Cyber essentials
Yes
Cyber essentials plus
Yes
Other security certifications
No

Social Value

Social Value

Social Value

  • Fighting climate change
  • Tackling economic inequality
  • Equal opportunity
  • Wellbeing

Fighting climate change

As a company, we’ve made an ambitious commitment to achieve Net Zero Carbon emissions by 2040 (or sooner) by supporting our customers net zero ambitions, creating software with inbuilt sustainability and reducing our own impact.

Our Carbon Reduction Plan demonstrates our ambition to become industry leaders in reducing our environmental impact in support of the UK’s Net Zero Target. Underlining this ambition, we are focusing not only on our direct emissions sources, but actively engaging with our supply chain to understand, measure and develop meaningful emissions reductions targets in line with our Net Zero Target.

We are accredited to ISO14001 Standard and to support delivery of our commitment our Environment, Social Value and Governance provides clear focus for the ongoing development of our environmental policy.

• We develop innovative software-based services that reduce power requirements.
• We help customers opt for more sustainable choices, through digital platforms/apps which remove paper, support flexible/agile working, all underpinned by cloud-based services employing energy efficient technology.
• We support carbon neutrality with workforces/facilities to reduce carbon consumption over the next 10-years.
• We prioritise the use of green energy in Civica owned facilities within the next 10 years.
• We promote recycling through our ‘Zero to Landfill’ and ‘Zero Print’ schemes.

Our commitment to continue to promote with employees and customers a much greater responsibility and leadership in eliminating unnecessary single-use plastics; we will continue to look to make more innovative and systematic changes to further reduce our use of single-use plastics across the organisation and to openly share our outcomes and learnings.

We undertake SECR Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting on our environmental footprint and the progress we are making to becoming Net Zero.

Our commitment to fighting climate change will help deliver the policy outcomes for fighting climate change under PPN 06/20.

Tackling economic inequality

Civica is committed to building an inclusive and diverse culture that tackles inequality in employment, skills and pay. We promote equal opportunity through all our activities and ensure rights for all employees are always protected. We are listed as a 2020 Financial Times Diversity Leader and we are a ‘Gold’ Investors in People company.

We have increased our focus and commitment to ensure we proactively implement equal and non-discriminatory treatment to all our workers. We have implemented a Diversity & Inclusion Strategy and have a Diversity and Inclusion Lead to drive the implementation of this strategy. This aims to tackle inequality in recruitment practices, team development, skills and pay through the following actions:

• We are a Living Wage accredited employer.
• We recruit locally to where services are delivered.
• We are committed to developing the skills of young people near our client’s businesses e.g., for a local authority, we have developed a programme of engagement workshops for young people with the potential for digital work experience.
• Our staff act as mentors for Youth Enterprise schemes in schools/universities.
• We are a member of the 5% club, an industry-led initiative focused on creating momentum behind the recruitment of apprentices into the UK workplace.
• Over 2.5% of our workplace is made up of apprentices or graduates and we intend to increase this to 5% by the end of 2025.
• We provide our own apprenticeship programme for managers, giving them access to training and development that may not be accessible outside the workplace.

Our commitment to building an inclusive and diverse culture will help deliver the policy outcomes for tackling economic inequality under PPN 06/20 and will dramatically improve job prospects and increase earning potential for the young and job seeking communities.

Equal opportunity

Civica is committed to providing equal opportunities and building an inclusive and diverse culture. The more diverse our workforce, the more informed the decisions we can make for our customers, supporting the communities in which we work.

We are proud to have been ranked as one of the top European companies for workforce diversity and equality, as chosen by in the Financial Times in 2020.

We are committed to building and maintaining an inclusive and supportive culture where diversity thrives:

• To ensure our recruitment practices support the attraction and hiring of diverse candidates, all vacancies are advertised on multiple Diversity & Inclusion platforms.
• We run attraction campaigns targeting females and BAME applicants. We use a process of anonymised applications, competency-based questions and scoring to remove bias. We also use decoders to ensure job advertisements use gender and culturally neutral language. We also ensure mixed panel interviewing.
• We advertise vacancies on https://disabilityjob.co.uk/ and share diversity statements on all job adverts.
• We have made training on diversity and inclusion mandatory.
• We aim to ensure increased diversity of new starters in technology/sales/leadership roles by 10% per annum over the next 3 years.
• We aim to ensure that at least 50% of shortlisted people are being considered from a diverse background for roles above £35k.
• We promote affinity groups within the company who represent a group of people linked by a common characteristic, often underrepresented, or historically excluded, which acts as a ‘safe space’ for such individuals. This identity could be related to race, gender, sexual orientation, language, nationality, physical or mental ability, socioeconomic class, family structure, religion, amongst others.

Our commitment to providing equality of opportunity will support the delivery of the policy outcomes for equal opportunity under PPN 06/20.

Wellbeing

Civica actively promote a mentally healthy workplace and workforce integrating mental health and general wellbeing in all that we do from recruitment, appraisals to strategic management.

Through our Health and Wellbeing Policy (HWP) and 40+ Mental Health Champions we encourage a flexible and realistic work/life balance. These provide a foundation to support the mental and physical health of our staff through:

• Employee Assistance Programme and online Wellbeing Hub, which provides 24/7 access to websites, e-mail, phone, face-to-face counselling on all personal issues.
• Aviva DigiCare+ Workplace App providing external mental health consultancy.
• Mental Health Champions who support colleagues’ wellbeing in the workplace.
• RedArc Personal nurse service.
• Management Coaching - managers are trained in GROW (Goals, Reality, Options and Will) and in being Health and Wellbeing Advisors, supporting employees with mental/physical health needs.
• Health assessments/advice aimed at improving physical health.
• Cycle to Work scheme to aid physical and mental health.
• Weekly fruit drop for offices, encouraging a healthier diet.
• Free eye tests for all VDU users, encourage staff to take advantage of NHS flu vaccinations services, and support people wishing to use the NHS Stop Smoking Service.

We also support our customers’ and communities’ through The Civica Foundation, our home for all charity, community, volunteering and social value. Our Days of Difference initiative gives every Civica employee 3 days a year to make a difference to charitable or community causes. Our employee’s can use this individually, join up as a team or take part in Civica coordinated events.

Suppliers/subcontractors are subject to Civica’s Sub-contractor Selection Process as defined in our ISO9001 Quality Management System, which includes criteria for assessing health and wellbeing policies.

Our commitment to providing equality of opportunity will support the delivery of the policy outcomes for Wellbeing under PPN 06/20.

Pricing

Price
£138 to £2,290 a unit a day
Discount for educational organisations
No

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at g-cloud@civica.co.uk. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.