Leader Interview | Discussing Smart Project Delivery with Matthew Salter, Director of Professional Services, Idox

Please tell us something about yourself.

I am Matthew Salter, director responsible for professional services at Idox. We have a team of about 120 people delivering implementation and customer experience services to a client base across both public and private sector. Most of my career has been in professional services, latterly with companies such as Capita and Northgate. Idox is a software and services company providing solutions to manage processes where there’s an element of regulation such as supporting planning, building control licensing, public protection, environmental health as well as the energy and construction industries.

What makes for a successful professional services team?

You’ve got to be absolutely people focused. I can teach you about products, I can teach you about the industry sector. But I can't teach attitude. Having a team that cares and can empathise with customers is really important. It cuts across all disciplines. Our consultants clearly have an advantage because they know the business processes, but it is equally important that our technical staff, our data staff, our project managers all understand enough about the customer pressure points to be able to empathise because inevitably, when things go wrong, it's understanding the impact.

A one week move to the right on your Gantt chart might not feel like much, but if it is just before a key billing cycle, then that's a real pain point for the customer. We want to build a trusted relationship that lasts over time and the way in which we interact with customers is just as vital as the quality of the products that we provide. In addition our team will advise, question and sometimes provide a different perspective. A little bit of thought leadership can add real value to a customer’s decision making processes.

What are your measures of success and how do you know you are doing a good job?

We have the usual professional services statistics around running projects to budget, staff utilisation, and those sorts of things, but there is also the customer satisfaction angle. We think about processes and outcomes, translating that into Net Promoter Scores both internally and externally, but for me it is often the softer measures that are more important than the hard stats. I'm directly engaged with 15 customers at the moment and those weekly calls are the ones where I know whether we're doing things right.