Acora and The User Experience

Today, we’re increasingly offered not merely products and services, but ‘experiences’. And before we see, eat, visit, wear or buy pretty much anything, the first thing we do is check the reviews: we want to know how was it for you? Are we going to have a positive experience of this movie, restaurant, hotel, t-shirt, airline, phone? Because if not, we don’t want to waste the thing we value even more than money: our time.

Oddly, though, our industry doesn’t seem to have got the memo. In managed IT circles, conventional metrics, notably the service level agreement (SLA), still trump user experience as the true measure of success.

We beg to differ.

At Acora, we’re in the business of providing something nobody can, or does: managed services designed for organisations that actually care about their people. Who want to create the most effective possible environment for their high performers. And who are fed up with trying to square an all-green dashboard with constant complaints from hacked-off users. Did somebody say ‘watermelon effect?’

It’s a big, bold, manifesto for wholesale change, which we’ve now set out in a series of papers. It starts with Enhancing the User Experience, giving a philosophical overview of why we’ve backed the user experience horse. Bringing the User Experience to Life goes into how we combine operational and technical with in-the-moment sentiment capture to build our Experience Level Agreement, or XLA. The final piece, Deploying the User Experience talks through what the XLA looks like in practice, and the immediate benefits and long-term impacts of tearing up the old rule-book and focusing relentlessly on delivering a great experience for all users.

You can read them all on our website – and please subscribe to our insights email list to get the latest from the frontline in our battle against outdated IT convention, under the banner Long Live the XLA!