Acun Medya

“I would recommend Xurrent to any company looking to transform their enterprise service management and simplify and improve processes. It provides complete cross-company visibility, is easy and fast to implement, user-friendly, and highly scalable.” — Eda Takbak Şahin, PMO and Process Improvement Director at Acun Medya”

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Acun Medya (“Acun”) is a 20+-year-old Turkish media company founded by Acun Ilıcalı that produces reality TV shows and owns television channels across Turkey and globally.

It’s produced major hits, including Come Dine with Me, Deal or No Deal, Got Talent, Fear Factor, Survivor, MasterChef, Dancing with the Stars, and The Voice. Acun also produces its own sports-reality format, EXHATLON, operates two Turkish mainstream TV channels, owns Exxen, a streaming service Exxen, and recently acquired the English soccer club Hull City.

With offices in Turkey, the Netherlands, Greece, Mexico, Romania, Hungary, Malta, and the Dominican Republic (and plans for further expansion), Acun is continuing to grow rapidly.

However, it faced an issue when it came to solving organizational complexity.

It was time for a new vendor

Over the past ten years, Acun has grown exponentially into an international organization with staff frequently working at offices in different countries. Some even move offices — and countries — a few times a year.

Receiving timely support, no matter the time zone, country, or language spoken, was essential.

While some local support for services existed in a handful of countries, that was more of an exception than the norm. More often, Acun’s support team handles requests from several countries.

In its hunt for a new task and project management tool, Acun reviewed monday.com, Asana, Jira, ManageEngine, and Trello.

But none fit the “one perfect platform, not just IT,” that Eda Takbak Şahin, PMO and Process Improvement Director at Acun, required.

They found one.

Tackling service complexity using a single platform (AKA, why Acun chose Xurrent)

“We listened to Xurrent just days before we were about to sign a contract with another company, and we were convinced,” said Eda. “We had received a good offer from one other party, but we only had one weekend to decide. We spent the weekend trying to understand Xurrent, and our minds changed.”

As Eda said, Acun ultimately partnered with Xurrent, which was a “swift decision,” but “it was obvious that Xurrent could handle everything we needed.”

Eda complimented Xurrent’s “very complete and scalable platform that provides full cross-enterprise transparency.” He said the ability to easily create workflows, manage all services, and work with different service catalogs in various countries was also critical.

Language was also essential for Acun Medya. Many Acun employees only speak one language — one that is not always the same as others in the organization. With Xurrent, all users can write issues and submit requests in their own language … and support teams can respond in their own language (See: Autotranslate feature).

Everyone understands each other.

“We now have complete visibility — a big plus for everyone. Customer experience has dramatically improved, providing us with complete control of service quality and cost. We can see how services perform, which create value for us, and which ones need improvement. This will result in a lot of future time and cost savings.” — Eda Takbak Şahin, PMO and Process Improvement Director, Acun Medya

A smooth, easy (and quick) implementation

After some early help setting up the initial architecture, the Acun team entered all services independently, analyzing which ones were necessary. They created workflows and all the required approval processes. Service catalogs were developed in collaboration with the different functions, with Xurrent helping organize.

“Right from the start, we included all departments and divided the implementation by location,” shared Ayberk Gönülkırmaz, Process Improvement Team Leader at Acun. “The Dominican Republic went first and was completed after one month. Then came Turkey. Within four-and-a-half months, we implemented all services for Turkey and the Dominican Republic. Of those four-and-a-half months, Xurrent spent the first two to three weeks implementing the solution, and after that, the team at Acun was able to implement most of the services themselves.”

Eda shared that the implementation exceeded her expectations. She expected a lot more Xurrent assistance to analyze necessary workflows and services. But after Xurrent provided some “key pointers,” Acun was off and running independently.

In collaboration with Xurrent partner BilgeAdamTechnologies (BilgeAdam), a presentation and a short user manual were prepared for support teams to reference after the training and “go live.”

Speaking of BilgeAdam …

“We have encountered many ITSM/ESM solutions, but Xurrent is different,” shared Alper Önsoy, Vice President Technology Services & Marketing at BilgeAdam. “Some tools on the market are easy to deploy, but they lack vision. And there are ‘big’ tools with huge sub-tool divisions, but they are difficult to use. Xurrent is easy to use yet has the enterprise vision and advanced features.”

Eda was also impressed that Acun only required “a small team” to run Xurrent. He said, “When you understand the basics and how to create a workflow, you can create others easily. We can solve a lot ourselves.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Before Xurrent, Acun sent requests via email or other apps … never quite sure who to send them to: Administrative services? Accommodation team?

In Xurrent, requests don’t get lost in the system. Search for the correct template, open a request, and Xurrent automatically routes it to the correct team. Not finding the answer in the Self-Service portal? No problem — the request automatically routes to the best team.

“Everything is easy. Straightforward.” One platform to handle it all.

And transparent.

End users can easily see how long it takes to solve an issue and follow the progress of their case. Complete transparency at every step.

Other things Acun loves about Xurrent:

• Workload reporting: The support team can see monthly numbers, status, and more.
• Mobile app: Since many don’t have desks, the app makes it easy for all.
• Everything is a yes: As Eda says, “When we started working with Xurrent, we received all sorts of requests; can we add this, can we add that? We asked Xurrent, and yes, yes, yes, it was all possible. Everyone was pleasantly surprised at how adaptable and scalable the solution is.”

Acun could not be happier with the decision to move forward with Xurrent. And the results speak for themselves.

Complete control of service quality and cost. Improved customer experience. And more.

Since implementing Xurrent, Eda has been impressed with the “complete visibility.” He shared how the customer experience has dramatically improved and how the team has “complete control of service quality and cost.

“We can see how services perform, which ones create value for us, and which ones need improving. This will result in future time and cost savings.”

By the numbers:

• 110: Xurrent service instances
• 9: Functions using Xurrent
• 2,000+: Employees supported in Xurrent in their own language
• 150: Specialists/agents using Xurrent
• ~ 3,000: Monthly requests handled in Xurrent
• 80: Percent of Xurrent usage outside of IT organization, including Administrative Affairs, HR, ERP, CDM, Accommodation & Travel, Security Services, and Healthcare — with others planned for the future.

Acun uses Xurrent for its complete enterprise service management. The platform has proven to reduce service complexity across the enterprise — a primary goal when searching for a new provider.

“By implementing Xurrent, we have improved all our processes. It is easy for us to create workflows; there is no need to have coding capability. An analytical mindset is enough to understand how it operates. We can implement most things ourselves, but when necessary, we receive excellent support from Xurrent; they are very accessible.”

Easy. Advanced. Complete.

Learn how Xurrent is unique.

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