Acora delivers new service desk offering for mid-market

Acora, the UK-based mid-market IT outsourcing specialist, has today announced the completion of Phase One of a massive restructure to its service desk which has already led to a significant jump in service levels.

The company has invested hundreds of thousands of pounds over the last 10 months to deliver an enhanced service to its growing customer base. Completion of the first phase culminated over the summer with the addition of new service desk personnel, increasing the operational team by 50% located at Acora’s operation centres in West Sussex and the West Midlands.

“We have a strategy that focuses on the needs of the mid-market,” said Paul Faulkner, COO at Acora. “Our previous service offering and the structure of our team was too flat to support the needs of the sector, so we have invested in a restructure that delivers people, processes and systems that are fully scalable. We are now more resource-focused on individual client requirements, we have a much greater level of quality control so we can review our performance against KPIs regularly and we have extended our service catalogue. This means that we are already meeting our metrics and service level agreements and we continue to improve.”

Building the service desk to deliver from the UK was important to Acora. Research amongst mid-market customers has indicated that this is a motivation along with availability 365 days a year and 24 hours a day.

“This is a feature that differentiates our service desk from our competition,” commented Paul Faulkner. “We are also offering clients the opportunity to utilise a dedicated pool of resource that they can draw on as and when they need it and we have built in a high level of flexibility, so, for example, we might take first-line support and pass second and third line support back to our client if that suits them best.”

Phase One of the restructure required not just a significant investment in money, but also in time and effort. Acora estimates that it has committed 400 man days to systems development and a further 250 man days to processing and external software. A rigorous induction and training programme is continuing through Phase Two which is now underway and focused on optimising service level tools as well as adding additional resource.

“In total the restructure is likely to take from 12 to 18 months and our objectives are to ensure quality control as part of a mature service and to drive customer satisfaction. It has been an extensive change for us, but as a result we now have seven team leaders driving seven desk teams and we are now positioned to target customers effectively and more consistently meet ITIL standards for IT service management,” concluded Paul Faulkner.