The Department of Veterans Affairs awarded Encore JV1 — a joint venture of USParaLog and Government Technical Services Corp., both based in Chantilly, Virginia — a contract valued at up to $153 million on May 8, 2026, to staff and operate the VA Veterans Experience Office contact center handling approximately 1.57 million annual inquiries from veterans, their families, and caregivers. The five-year hybrid firm-fixed-price and labor-hour contract covers one base year plus four option years, and requires Encore JV1 to maintain more than 360 agents available around the clock across telephone, email, web chat, TTY, and TDD channels.
What the VEO Contact Center Does
The Veterans Experience Office is VA's customer experience arm — the office responsible for measuring and improving how veterans perceive their interactions with the department. Its contact center is the frontline of that mission: a 24/7/365 operation that fields inquiries on VA benefits eligibility, claim status, appointment scheduling, healthcare referrals, and the technical support helpdesk for VA.gov, where millions of veterans access their health records, benefits information, and direct messaging with VA staff.
The 1.57 million annual inquiries figure translates to roughly 130,000 contacts per month, or more than 4,000 per day. The volume is not evenly distributed — it spikes around benefit filing deadlines, major VA policy announcements, and healthcare enrollment periods, requiring the contractor to maintain surge capacity above the baseline staffing level. The statement of work requires Encore JV1 to meet service level agreements covering average speed of answer, first-call resolution rates, and customer satisfaction scores measured through post-contact surveys.
The contact center operates remotely — agents work from home locations within 50 miles of a VA facility, a structural choice that expands the talent pool beyond expensive urban VA campus locations while maintaining geographic proximity to VA for occasional in-person coordination. This remote-first model became standard at VEO during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been retained as the permanent operating model.
Joint Venture Structure and Small Business Implications
Encore JV1's joint venture structure — pairing USParaLog and Government Technical Services Corp. — is a common approach to VA contact center contracting. VA has historically supported small business participation in its contact center acquisitions, and a joint venture allows two smaller firms to combine past performance and management capacity to compete for a program that would exceed the size standard for either individually.
The VA contact center market has been competitive: several large business primes including Maximus Federal, SAIC, and Accenture Federal Services have pursued similar programs, and their capacity to staff large-scale contact center operations gives them inherent advantages. Joint ventures of smaller firms can compete effectively by demonstrating lower overhead rates, specialized veteran-focused staffing approaches, and flexibility in agent deployment — all of which appear to have favored Encore JV1 in this competition.
Technology and AI Augmentation
The statement of work for the VEO contact center contract includes provisions for technology-augmented customer service — conversational AI tools that can handle routine inquiry routing, knowledge base lookups, and simple transactional requests before escalating to a human agent. This reflects a broader VA digital modernization effort that has introduced AI chatbots on VA.gov and automated scheduling systems in VA healthcare.
Encore JV1 will be responsible for integrating these AI tools with the human agent workflow, ensuring that agents have access to veteran case data from VA's systems of record, and maintaining continuity of service when VA's underlying IT systems experience outages. The last requirement is particularly demanding: VA's legacy systems have a history of unplanned downtime, and contact center agents must be able to continue serving veterans through manual backup procedures when digital systems are unavailable.
What It Means for Contractors
- Encore JV1 will need to rapidly hire and train more than 360 remote agents with veteran services knowledge; firms that provide contact center staffing, training development, and quality assurance services should contact Encore JV1's subcontracting office immediately.
- Technology vendors with VA-approved conversational AI tools, secure remote desktop solutions, and FedRAMP-authorized cloud contact center platforms should evaluate integration partnership opportunities with Encore JV1.
- The VEO contract is separate from VA's larger enterprise contact center programs at the Veterans Benefits Administration and Veterans Health Administration — watch for related solicitations at VBA and VHA as VA continues consolidating its customer experience infrastructure.
- Firms that competed and lost should evaluate GAO protest grounds carefully; joint venture contract awards in VA programs have historically attracted post-award protests challenging the JV's compliance with SBA affiliation rules and past performance attribution.