Vendor Relationship Manager
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About The Position
The Vendor Relationship Manager serves as the critical liaison between Service Operations and external vendors, ensuring that departmental performance objectives are met through the establishment and maintenance of strong relationships, processes, expectations, and alignment between various segments, service operations, and vendor partners specifically for call centers. This role is pivotal in preparing, leading, and monitoring a variety of meetings—weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc—with vendors, segment leaders, and service operations leaders. The goal is to ensure that both vendor and internal teams are aligned on strategic direction, workforce planning, and performance expectations, while also fostering consistent collaboration between managers. In addition to meeting coordination, the Vendor Relationship Manager is responsible for developing process and performance improvement plans in collaboration with vendors. This includes partnering with assigned vendor managers to ensure that these plans are effectively implemented and communicated to vendor teams. The role requires the development of execution plans, collaboration on rollout strategies, and measuring success or identifying gaps through performance analysis, remote management, and site visits. The manager must ensure that interactions between the business and vendor are effective and mutually respectful. Maintaining alignment with other BCBSM Vendor Relationship Managers is also a key responsibility, ensuring a consistent and integrated approach with all vendor partners. This involves leveraging lessons learned, celebrating successes, and assessing effectiveness to ensure continuous improvement and adjustments based on evolving business needs. The Vendor Relationship Manager will also provide updates on process changes, solicit feedback for improvement opportunities, propose solutions, and guide teams to ensure effective interactions with vendors. Coaching, mentoring, and directing peers, project teams, leaders, and third-party vendor leadership are essential functions of this role, aimed at achieving contract performance goals. This requires a blend of management skills, including relationship management, time management, analysis, planning, communication, negotiation, delegation, and organizational skills. The manager will review vendor performance reports, conduct invoice reviews to reconcile discrepancies, identify issues, propose solutions, and escalate issues to senior leadership when necessary.
