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Perftour 2023 – Behind the Show Episode 05

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The Performance Tour Season 2023 Episode 05 on Shifting the Service Desk Left was released on June 07, 2023. If you have not seen it yet, you can check it out here:

Shifting The Service Desk Left

In this episode, I wanted to talk about shifting the service desk left. This means something different than shifting performance or quality left. How do we make the service desk more proactive? A DEX platform makes this possible.


Interview with Elise Carmichael

I met with Elise in Gainesville, Florida on a Saturday. Elise is CTO of Lakeside Software, and was the perfect guest to discuss how to shift the service desk left. It was actually my first stop on the spring Performance Tour trip as I was on my way to Atlanta for the Perftour Live Event. We actually met at the headquarters for West Networks:

My friend Peter West and his brother Daniel were gracious enough to allow us to do the interview there. You may remember Peter was a guest on the show last year. If you have not seen that episode, here is the link:

It’s really a fascinating discussion about cellular routers, wifi, and satellite communications.

The interview with Elise went well. I had to set up all the camera and sound equipment myself, and I am always paranoid about getting the lighting and sound right. I’ve had some issues in the past, and that is why I always like to have Luke Taylor do it when he’s available. That was not the case this time. Surprisingly, everything worked out perfectly. Elise knows her stuff and so the conversation flowed easily.

The most important thing I got out of our talk was the need for the right data for making decisions that lead to a great user experience.Lakeside Software is focused on capturing that data and providing it in such a way to help preempt problems with the corporate workforce. In fact, Lakeside captures 10,000 endpoint data points every 15 seconds. If you think that’s a lot of data, you’re right. It’s the most complete, accurate, and real-time data in the digital employee experience (DEX) market. Lakeside then uses this massive amount of data to provide comprehensive visibility across an entire enterprise IT estate. This means, the Service Desk can see an issue in real-time as it happens – before the employee even submits a ticket.

As you could probably tell, I am bothered by the fact that I’ve spent a career trying to optimize the back end software that people use every day, but there can still be poor end user experience everywhere. Many times this has nothing to do with the back end, and we need to focus on the other factors that are ruining the user experience. It could be a bad WiFi router, an outdated version of software, or just an underpowered laptop. We have to look at both sides of the user experience today, and getting the right data is the key.


Mojo Hogtown BBQ

After the interview, we headed to BBQ. But first, I was distracted by Elise’s car. Looking at the picture, you can see why I think it is better suited for a show called “The Performance Tour”.

Of course, I took this picture and told all of my friends it was my car. LOL!

We traveled across town to the BBQ place (a local favorite) in HER car.

The BBQ was good. Elise brought her family out, and Daniel West came along with us as well.

It was a great first stop on the spring 2023 tour. The only negative was that my air conditioner went out on the way up to north Florida. I ended up making the trip to Atlanta and Austin with no air the entire way. Fortunately, it never really got too hot during my travels.

I still think there is more to unpack in the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) space, so expect more details around that in the future.

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