Tips on Working with an Online Vendor

At my current organization, we've just rolled out our first week of going live with Convio for our national walks program, which raised over $6 million in the past year.  Having worked with many online services products, below I offer some tips in maintaining a successful relationship with your vendor:

1. Take advantage of any training that is available to learn the product.  This enables you to deal with issues more quickly and avoids the situation where support staff impatiently tell you to 'read the manual'
2. Develop a rapport with your account manager or whoever has been assigned to handle your relationship.  This includes asking not only what the vendor can do for you, but what your responsibilities are in using the product and dealing with the vendor's staff.
3. Document problems over the web;  Convio provides a Salesforce enabled support system which allows me to review calls I've placed, and add updates.  If your vendor doesn't provide this, use your own tracking system, as I did in the past with a product like Elementool.
4. Be respectful about prioritizing issues.  If a problem is affecting a major application and / or many of your co-workers, make sure the vendor knows this and use escalation procedures.  (Make sure you specifically ask about how to escalate issues.)  If you make every problem into an 'emergency,' then nothing will be treated as a high priority.
5. If you're dealing with a vendor like Convio that has many modules, learn which products are most actively supported (preferably before you've decided on a vendor);  you can find this out by asking which modules are used by the most large clients.
6. When rolling out a new application, be sure to test exhaustively.  We're dealing with a problem this week that we might have avoided had we tested a bit more extensively.
7. Develop a relationship with other nonprofits that are already using the product and take advantage of any online forums (either promoted by the vendor or not) to learn from others and share your own experiences.
8. Be careful of criticizing your vendor to internal staff.  Even if you're feeling frustrated on a particular day, don't vent to your co-workers;  you want them to feel positively about the product you've selected despite any occasional glitches that come up.