Enquiry & Customer Management Pre-Market Engagement

Anchor Hanover Group is England’s largest not-for-profit provider of housing and care for older people, operating 120 care homes across England. These services support over 6000 older people with a range of residential care needs where safety, dignity, independence, accessibility and regulatory assurance are central to day-to-day operations.

Anchor Hanover Group is undertaking preliminary market engagement to understand supplier capability and market approaches for enquiries, admissions, occupancy and relationship management across its care home business. This notice forms part of a wider care technology pre-market engagement exercise that also includes nurse call and incident management.

Anchor is considering these areas together to understand the market landscape, potential integration points and future delivery options across its care technology roadmap. This activity enables market research to help Anchor define requirements, design the target state architecture and build the business case.[EC1.1] It does not start a procurement process, does not commit Anchor to any future competition and supplier responses will not be scored or used to select or exclude suppliers.

Anchor wants to improve the experience of prospective residents, relatives, representatives and colleagues from first enquiry through to accepted admission. The opportunity is to strengthen enquiry capture, qualification, marketing campaign attribution, home matching, assessment coordination, admissions progression, occupancy visibility and relationship management across a multi-site care home environment.

Anchor is seeking to reduce avoidable duplication, improve pipeline and conversion insight, support more consistent ways of working, increase occupancy and ensure that accepted admissions can transition effectively into downstream care, finance and reporting processes. Anchor is interested in understanding whether the market can meet this need through dedicated enquiries and admissions products, CRM-led approaches, broader care technology platforms or integrated partner models.

Anchor currently expects some care technology systems to be retained in the immediate future, including its care planning platform. Suppliers should therefore explain, at a high level, how their proposed approach would integrate with retained and future systems without creating unnecessary duplicate records or unclear ownership of care, resident, finance or reporting data.

Anchor may also need to consider a future customer financial planning capability alongside the shorter-term priority for enquiries management. Suppliers should explain whether their approach could support or integrate with future processes for indicative fees, funding arrangements, payer information, financial planning and handover into customer finance, without extending the immediate engagement into a detailed finance specification at this stage.