How to Keep the Time Spent Dealing with Vendors Manageable

Let’s face it--you waste countless hours on the phone dealing with vendors for all of your business needs. Whether it’s a new software solution or hardware component, you’ll have to go through someone to get it, whether it’s a big retailer like Amazon or your local Mom and Pop computer store but working with your vendors has several unforeseen costs that you might not even know exist.

Imagine that you’re looking to implement a new piece of software into your organization’s infrastructure, but you don’t know what kind of solution you want or need. You start doing some research online, but you would like to talk to a representative from a company first before committing to something that you don’t necessarily want or need. The conversation seems to go well, but then one thing leads to another and you have been on the phone for a long time. You later find out that the solution isn’t the one for your business, which makes this entire conversation a waste of time and a failure in your eyes.

Now let’s say that your organization goes along with the solution and implements something that doesn’t work well with your current setup. You try to get support for this software solution because you want to get the most out of your investment. Now you’re spending even more time on the phone or sending emails and ticket responses to the software provider, trying to get them to understand what exactly you’re going through and how to resolve it.

Imagine having to go through this process for each and every solution you implement. It adds up quickly and can be incredibly wasteful. This is without mentioning that each of your vendors will have varying points of contact, email addresses, and phone numbers, making communication difficult at best--especially in numbers. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way to manage all of your vendors with a single point of contact?

Vendor management is the ideal way to approach the procurement of new solutions for your organization, as it takes the countless contacts that you have for your business technology needs and consolidates them into a single point of contact. For example, if you’re having issues with a particular solution, or you are interested in implementing another, all you have to do is reach out to your point of contact at Washington Works. We document every device, software license, and vendor contact on your network, so we can work with them effectively. This way, you don’t need to wait on hold or get sent offshore to talk to a level one support person who will ask you to reboot your device for the third time. Instead, you’ll relay your issue or need to one of our technicians who is familiar with your network and can pull up documentation and notes to aid them in getting things moving faster, without wasting time.

In short, Washington Works’s vendor management service serves as the single point of contact for all of your business’ technology needs. All you have to do is reach out to us at 301-571-5040.