Vendor Manager

Job Description

The New York Times is looking for a Vendor Manager to join our Care Vendor Operations team. You will be The New York Times' primary operational owner of outsourced contact center performance. You will focus on ensuring our vendor partners consistently meet service, quality, and financial expectations through strong performance management, clear accountability, and disciplined execution.

About the Role

You will oversee daily vendor oversight, structured performance reviews, and continuous improvement, working with internal partners across Workforce, Finance, Product, and Audit. You will not manage intraday staffing or forecasting, but you will use those inputs to hold vendors accountable and create outcomes that reflect the NYT brand and values.

This is an in-person role, reporting to the Director of Workforce and Care Operations. You will work on a diverse team with a customer-focused mission.

Responsibilities:

• Be the daily contact for all NYT's contact center partners.
• Lead all weekly, monthly and quarterly business reviews with our contact centers. Set the agenda and make sure both vendors and company partners come prepared to have a productive conversation.
• Ensure updates to the internal NYT team(s) regarding vendor performance, particularly addressing any areas of concern.
• Establish clear performance expectations and hold partners accountable for meeting goals. Make sure key metrics, including Customer Effort Score, Line Adherence, QA score, and save rate, stay within acceptable ranges. Additionally, retained revenue should also stay within ambitious ranges. If these metrics aren't within the acceptable ranges, quickly put remediation plans in place.
• Lead continuous improvement efforts across vendor partners by diagnosing causes, surfacing inefficiencies, and working to implement scalable efficiency and performance improvements.
• Evaluate the need to realign business partnerships and workload across partners or sites.
• Ensure compliance and quality controls are in place at all vendors. Partner with our internal audit team to conduct periodic risk evaluations of BPO partners and develop risk mitigation plans where needed.
• Maintain deep working knowledge of all lines of business, tools, processes, and procedures to provide accurate guidance, coaching, and operational direction to vendor partners.
• Embed within your scrum team and cross-functional working groups to coordinate vendor execution. Remove delivery blockers that obstruct it. Ensure you fully align external partners to internal priorities, timelines, and quality standards.
• Manage vendor spend, partnering with Finance and company partners to ensure delivery stay within budget while meeting performance and quality expectations.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications:

• You have 5+ years of experience in contact center relationship management or management at a call center.
• You're well-versed in call center operations and metrics.
• You know the drivers of Care metrics in both real-time and asynchronous channels, and you know what best-in-class performance is.
• You are experienced in summarizing and presenting insights in a compelling and data-rich format. You're succinct and clear.
• You see patterns and trends easily in data and have experience tracking down the right answer and insights from the data.
• You have a track record of prioritizing the most important and impactful work to deliver results.
• You're willing to travel up to 15% of the time
• You are occasionally available to be on call during weekends, when needed
• Must be available to work Eastern Standard Time (EST) hours

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with AWS Connect for tech stack
• Prior work on retention or sales 
• Experience working with or in media industry

REQ-020160

For roles in the U.S., dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock. Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs. 

For roles outside of the U.S., information on benefits will be provided during the interview process.

The New York Times Company is committed to being the world’s best source of independent, reliable and quality journalism. To do so, we embrace a diverse workforce that has a broad range of backgrounds and experiences across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. We encourage people from all  backgrounds to apply.

We are  an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate on the basis of an individual's sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.  The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)’s Know Your Rights Poster is available here. 

The New York Times Company will provide reasonable accommodations as required by applicable federal, state, and/or local laws. Individuals seeking an accommodation for the application or interview process should email reasonable.accommodations@nytimes.com. Emails sent for unrelated issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

The Company encourages those with criminal histories to apply, and will consider their applications in a manner consistent with applicable "Fair Chance" laws, including but not limited to the NYC Fair Chance Act, the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

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