In this episode we talk to Brad Birnbaum, co-founder and CEO of Kustomer, Matt Dixon, Chief Product and Research Officer at Tethr, and Lauren Pragoff, Vice President of Effortless Experience at Challenger. We talk about some of the largest issues and challenges companies have been facing during the pandemic, such as employees transitioning to working from home and how they’ve had to crack down on making help readily available through their online channels. Another thing they’ve seen is an increase in inquiry volume and a lack of reps to meet the demand of these inquiries. We discuss the fact that the world is ready for more machine learning and more advanced artificial intelligence to meet the needs of this increasing demand. Lauren has seen that a third of companies are actually seeing a decrease in inquiries with the pandemic, so they’ve had to use a proactive outreach approach to keep reps busy. We talk about how many customers go to a lot of third party sources of information in order to get the answer to their questions, such as Youtube or Google, but these sources aren’t always reliable. Brad tells us about a technological shift companies should be using to meet the needs and desires of customers, such as reaching out and answering their question before they actually ask it.Guest introductions 1:41The biggest challenge companies are facing and how they are overcoming it 3:56How Matt has seen people doing more with less 12:28Types of technologies companies should be adopting now to make this change more successful 25:42“The thing that really got our customers to stay on our website and not get frustrated, pick up the phone and call is when we started writing at a grade 5 to 7 reading level so that customers could absorb that information quickly. So often our content is laden with corporate jargon, industry vernacular, or stuff that the attorneys made us add in and it stopped making sense to our customers. So go back, make it simple, and it’ll stick. It’ll siphon off those live calls.” 24:42https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-pragoff-99967532/https://www.kustomer.com/leadership/brad-birnbaum/https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleybirnbaum/Twitter: @bradbirnhaum https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewxdixon/https://tethr.com/leadership/matt-dixon/