ÄKTA (Out of Business)

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

My company is a Web-based relocation platform. We help employers offer a robust benefit to their employees, delivered in the cloud.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m one of the co-founders and the CEO of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with AKTA?

We wanted to re-envision how our users leverage our product, so we reinvented the user experience from the ground up. We were looking for a paradigm shift, not just improvements over the existing way we had been doing it.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

They provide a combination of consulting and delivering implementable code that we could plug into our back-end infrastructure. Everything from the conception portion, the user experience design, the information architecture, and the actual visual design was provided by them.

What was your process for selecting AKTA with which to work?

We talked to advisors and various trusted resources, and we came up with a list of about six to eight potential partners. We conducted initial phone screens with each of them, which allowed us whittle the list down to three to five. We cut it in half. One we got it within that range, we had in-person meetings. We did a site visit with all but one for that meeting. We saw their facility and met some of the team that would be potentially working on our project.

We had some follow-up, and narrowed it down to three agencies. We had some more follow-ups, looked at the data, organized it in a matrix, and AKTA came out ahead in terms of what we were looking for. There were other factors, including proximity to our office, we wanted the teams working closely together.

Is their work ongoing?

We broke up our project into a few different phases. We completed the first phase, so there are one or two phases remaining at this point on the initial engagement. The work is ongoing, but we put a small pause to the work because we had to catch up internally. We expect the engagement to last another six to 12 months.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Each phase is a little different. From start to finish, it was estimated to be between $300,000 to $500,000.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How did they perform?

Overall, they delivered what we set out to accomplish. They gave us a paradigm shift in the user experience, a very nice aesthetic to the overall look and feel of the platform. We aren’t completely done implementing the work they provided to us. There is an unfinished portion, but it's on our end. Things are definitely moving in the right direction in terms of how we're going about solving problems for our customers.

Do you have any stats or metrics to track improvement from the project?

We just have user feedback. I don’t have any hard data. It's still a bit early to have a definitive proof point on whether we moved the needle or not.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

I think they have a very organized way of explaining what they do and getting companies to see the value of their process. Other agencies that we met with were a little more disorganized in that respect. They may do very good work, but they don’t do a great job of communicating to the client about their unique value.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

We addressed this with them. There was a little bit of a disconnect in terms of keeping us informed of the hours being consumed. We were tracking perfectly to what our budget was for this first phase, and we ran into a situation where the hours stacked up quickly. It was out of line with what the previous pace had been. It made us go substantially over budget, which was disappointing, but they were very receptive to working with us to bring it back into the general zone of what we had set up to expect for the first phase. They mitigated the issue by giving us a break on some of the hours that they worked on before.

It happened very quickly. It was a two- to three-week window where we went from being on track to being over budget by a substantial percentage. The recommendation is for them to keep in contact with clients religiously about hours worked, they have already improved.