When you have a strategically important contract with a vendor you will need several touch points into the vendor and the vendor will need to draw information from you as the customer to ensure that they provide the best service they can for you.
The best way of ensuring this occurs is to set up the appropriate level of meetings.
The first meeting that needs to be set up is an operational meeting. An operational meeting deals with the everyday things that the vendor is doing. Operational meetings will be specific to the service or product being provided. For example a road construction operational meeting will discuss if a road is being built on time and to the right standard and if not what do we do to fix it. An IT operational meeting scope may talk about whether the vendor is delivering the laptops to the new employees within the expected time.
The next meeting to be established is a contract level meeting. This meeting will discuss whether the vendor is meeting the service levels that were expected. Is the vendor being paid on time? It will track specific contract deliverables such as the delivery of certain reports.
The third meeting is the executive level meeting this meeting should be with senior executives in the organisation and usually the executive who is responsible for the business function that the vendor is supporting. These meeting will be more strategic in nature.
Some of these meetings can be rolled together but they should all have the theme of developing relationships at various levels within the organisation. My next few articles will go into more details on each of the above meetings starting with the operational level meeting.