Vensure Employer Services

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a non-profit organization with 188 full-time employees.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Vensure Employer Services?

We hired Vensure to manage everything related to employee payroll, benefits, HR, and HR data management. We had originally been with another company, which we loved, but

What were your goals for this engagement?

Accurate, timely & reliable payroll, benefits, & reporting for our staff.

SOLUTION

How did you select Vensure Employer Services?

We did not chose to work with Vensure. Vensure acquired our previous payroll provider, so we were forced to switch to them.

Describe the engagement in detail.

Vensure was hired to process our bi-weekly payroll for staff, manage the enrollments, deductions, and reporting for our employee benefits, manage the tax deductions and reporting to government organizations, and host/manage employee data related to their job/pay/benefits/etc.

What was the team composition?

Myself and an HR manager worked directly with representatives from Vensure.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the engagement that demonstrate progress or success?

Vensure acquired our previous payroll/HR provider in the summer of 2020, and we were forced to transition to their platform and services. In the seven months that we used Vensure’s system and services, we have experienced countless challenges and significant mistakes on their part.

Some examples include: 

• They forgot to pay the premiums to our benefit carriers (this was part of the agreed service) and our employees almost lost their benefits multiple times because of this. Each time, we reminded them that they forgot, and they apologized and said it would be fixed. It happened again and again each month until we left.
• When employees enrolled in benefits on their platform, they failed to enroll the employees in those benefits with the carriers but deducted the premiums from the employees payroll. This happened multiple times.
• We ran approx. 15 payrolls with them, and not a single one of them went through without mistakes that Vensure made.
• They messed up the 2020 W2 reports for approx. 50 employees, despite me pointing out the mistake in early January before the cutoff date for corrections.
• They filed the W2s with the mistakes I pointed out, and then said they could not give us an ETA on W2 corrections this spring because they made so many mistakes with their other clients that they couldn’t keep up with the amount corrections that needed to be done.
• Whenever we faced problems their representatives would stop answer emails or phone calls for weeks on end. We would send countless messages trying to get someone to help us fix the problem, and no body would respond.
• They don’t include job titles, phone numbers, or any contact information on their email signatures or online. So, it’s very difficult to get in touch with anyone at the company besides what email addresses we knew about and their main support number, which was often just forwarded to voicemail.
• Their platform does not allow HR staff within the company to do simple tasks such as creating new job titles, adjusting employee benefits, changing employee addresses, add/change company or staff documents, updating payroll data, etc.
• They all require someone from Vensure to do that task for the client, but the Vensure staff don’t respond to messages and requests for weeks on end.
• Their reporting tool is very limited and does not provide very simple, common reports that we used frequently with other payroll providers.
• We had very little support during our annual benefit open enrollment. When they finally helped us get it started, every single benefit premium was listed incorrectly (despite the fact that our premiums didn’t change from the prior year). It took 3 months for those premiums to be corrected, and the employee payroll deductions to be corrected.
• They forgot to file our monthly tax returns to several government entities a couple times.

This is not an exhaustive list of problems we experienced with Vensure, but should give you a good idea about the kind of service you can expect from them. Basically, there is no reliable customer service, and the platform itself is very rudimentary and riddled with problems.

This was by far the worst experience we’ve ever had with any vendor of any kind, and it significantly impacted our staff, their pay and benefits, and the reputation of our HR department within the company.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very ineffective. They were extremely difficult to get in contact with. They hid their phone numbers and didn't post any information about an organization chart or contact information for other staff members.

The only reps we had emails for would go weeks without responding to messages, especially if those messages were about problems we needed fixed. They gave us false promises constantly about when they would get back to us with responses (such as "end of day" or "end of the week") and then we would never hear from them again.

What did you find most impressive about this vendor?

That they have managed to stay in business at all with such terrible customer service and nearly fraudulent business practices.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Everything. I can't think of any area that don't need a complete overhaul.