It was quite a coup for the Isle of Man section to get Peter to visit our shores.

He's a much sought after speaker and consultant and his diary is typically filled months in advance.

He was formerly a director at Alliance & Leicester plc, where he achieved world class status for its IT services.

His clients cover a range of industries including process control, retail, travel and leisure and healthcare.

His book World Class IT Service Delivery is a BCS best-seller and having seen him in action, I understand why.

Central to his proposition is taking best practice from the marketing and management worlds and applying it to information technology services.

He says that IT has now become like the retail trade in that it provides services directly to the man in the street.

Most successful retailers will tell you that it's the service that a customer will judge you by not just the products they buy, and it's the same dynamic for those who provide IT services.

In a nutshell, Peter Wheatcroft's proposition is about putting customer service at the centre of everything you do.

This is hardly radical or revolutionary right?

Well then, how come so many IT services get it wrong?

You need to start by looking at staff satisfaction.

How can anyone deliver world class service if they aren't happy at work? Peter says: 'Defining your organisation as a "first choice employer" is an essential precursor to becoming a 'first choice supplier'.

Managing staff satisfaction starts by knowing what matters to your people and this ranges from where they work, to what they work on right through to how you treat them.'

Then you need to think about customer satisfaction.

You need to recognise that every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to satisfy and impress them.

So whether it's a software developer that might interact with a customer once or twice a month or a help desk technician who takes 15,000 calls a month, each time they interact with a customer is what Peter calls 'a moment of truth'.

'This revolves around the principle of a supplier-customer interaction aimed at resolving the service request, not just to conform with a prescribed service process,' says Peter.

You might think this is obvious but might be surprised to know that many IT companies cleave to service level agreements and strive to 'discipline the client'.

Instead they should be educating the client by advocating training initiatives such as ECDL (the European Computer Driving Licence) for generic PC skills or by deploying proprietary training regimes such as INVEST, which can take account of business process as well as technical proficiency needs.

Service delivery has a major role to play in the design of new applications. You need to get customer input to help build operability into a system. And then you can't just assume your system works. A service-centric organisation will ask its customers what they think about what they receive – another thing we marketers understand perhaps more than our techie counterparts.

While your own key performance indicators might show that you are hitting your targets, your customers will rate you by HOW those targets were achieved, including whether the engineer who came to fix your telephone exchange was helpful and courteous.

Peter explains: 'Customer satisfaction will never be 100 per cent on the basis that you can't please all the people all the time, so market research specialists have defined good service as being when 80 per cent of your customers rate you highly.

'Would 80 per cent of your users have a good word to say about your service – and which 80 per cent are they?'

About 30 people turned up to hear Peter's BCS presentation, a surprisingly low number in my opinion. Any organisation that provides IT services to 'customers' either internal or external, should have been there.

But the good news is that, for those who missed his talk, you can still buy his book on www.bcs.org or at on amazon.co.uk.

Mark your diary for the next BCS event on Wednesday, October 29.

It's a search engine optimisation masterclass taking place at the Ballakermeen High School lecture hall. There is no cost involved and everyone is welcome.


>>Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. Visit her business blog, Strive Notes for frequent updates www.strivepr.com/notes or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne.