Crystal is a Contract Management Team Lead for SPS Commerce, one of the largest technology employers in Minneapolis. Her main duties include hiring interested candidates, creating training materials for new employees, and keeping the workforce up to date on company policy and direction.
Transcript
Hi, my name is Crystal Spanjers. My job title is lead contract management specialist. I work for SPS Commerce. SPS is one of the largest technology employers in Minneapolis. The company itself specializes in electronic document exchange between suppliers and retailers. Some of my responsibilities include just like on the department level, interviewing new hires, training, creating training materials, training in new people, keeping our staff up to date on changes in the company, providing ongoing training when there are changes in pivots that some of the like day-to-day things. More interestingly, I get to work on a lot of process improvements that touch a lot of different departments. Our main area of expertise is contracts. So when customers have contract disputes or want to alter their agreement, or a large things happen like all the retail shutdowns during the early phases of COVID, that sort of customer noise hits our department directly. Actually takes kind of a lot of people and a lot of discussion, and a lot of, you know high level analysis to what's going to be fair. What's that timeline going to look like? Does everyone agree to this? You never want your customer to just like walk away from an agreement that gets, well bad for your business and gets even more complicated. But talking with these customers and trying to find a negotiation where everyone can be pleased, and feel like they walked away with a fair business value. That's really when you hit the sweet spot, that's when you're doing the job right. I live in contracts. I read through them every day and get very familiar with what all of the different clauses and terms and specifics are, but customers do not, and it's not unusual to have a customer who may have been with you for, you know, 10 years and when you pull out the contract and discuss it, they don't know what those specifics are. They don't know what what's going to dictate there. So a lot of it is also just customer education, building relationships.
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