Aflac deploys bionics concept for digital transformation

Aflac guided digital transformation through the pandemic, keeping customer focus virtual

The company logo sits on a flag displayed outside an Aflac Inc. store in Tokyo, Japan, on Feb. 3, 2014.

Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Rich Gilbert, CIO and chief transformation officer at Aflac, led the company’s One Digital Aflac initiative, shifting it from simply upgrading IT to make the company a digital service-based organization. His previous career experience includes roles at IBM, Hewlett Packard and SunTrust (now Truist), so he brought both technology and banking knowledge to his position at Aflac. Digital Insurance spoke with Gilbert about how the pandemic accelerated Aflac’s digital transformation effort, the concept of bionics and what it means to these efforts, and what the rest of the company’s digital transformation may look like.

How do you define the One Digital Aflac initiative?

Rich Gilbert, CIO and chief transformation officer, Aflac

Going from a technology company into industry helped me understand that in industry, it’s being able to apply cutting-edge technology at scale. That gave me a balanced understanding of how to drive leading-edge technology, but also implement it and drive it at scale.

Insurance typically isn't a leading-edge industry. When I came in, we had legacy processes and systems, everything that you would think about with a 64-year-old company. We launched One Digital Aflac to be the vision and the strategy on where we're going, our vision being let's use technology to make things easier – easier for our customers to buy from us, easier for our sales team to sell in the marketplace, and easier for our employees to work at Aflac.

One of the main things was customer centricity. We launched programs to optimize our whole model. We shifted our technology organization from an IT organization to a customer centric organization, which meant building and bridging the business and technology teams together. So we even changed the name from IT to Digital Services. We built our journey maps, we built our strategy all around, making things easier for the customer. That resulted in new customer experiences, new websites and new mobile apps. We launched a new mobile app called My Aflac, and a new field producer app called Agent Hub. Then the pandemic hit and all bets were off. We needed to double down on digital to be able to drive our strategy going forward.

How did the pandemic change the way Aflac operates its business?

We had to think about all of our processes, our front-office engagements with our customers, how our sales teams are interacting and working, and how we processed work. We reinvented everything in our portfolio to digitize things from the customer engagement all the way through to the back office. A lot about One Digital Aflac that we focused on in the beginning was around customer centricity. When COVID hit, it was not only serving the customer, but also serving sales teams because their whole model was disrupted.

We started to look at bionics, which combines machine capability and human capability to drive outcomes. How do we create, for example, a bionic customer, by making it easier for them to file claims? How do we create a bionic agent to make it easier to sell? How do we create a bionic employee making it easier to work? It came down to how do we automate all of those different activities to be able to achieve that goal. That led us to machine learning and artificial intelligence and how we think about data and analytics.

Traditionally insurance is a product that's sold and not bought. Our agents sell those products at the work site. COVID eliminated the work site and human interaction. We had to create a model around virtual selling. How do you do virtual prospecting? How do you virtually explain the benefits of an insurance product? We built all of these capabilities to be able to do that. The bionics create that virtual model to engage with a customer.

How did bionics combining human and machine capabilities get applied to other processes at Aflac?

We needed to think about how bionics could be used to drive automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence into back-office functions. We developed enterprise intelligent automation, taking the concepts of data and analytics, natural language processing, robotics, automation and artificial intelligence and putting them all together because each of those technology areas has a value. When you combine all of those in an enterprise capability, you get intelligent automation that can change your business.

Insurance companies are all about how to support their agents, then how to support customers in a time of need, which is all about the claims process. When a policyholder submits a claim, we then use natural language processing to take the data that they submit and transform that into digital content. We take that digital content through a machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithm to quickly realize all the benefits that they could have with their policy or policies, then auto-adjudicate and pay that claim.

When a claims adjuster gets the claim, it's 85 or 90% done. You need the human in the loop to get that claim across the line. Any circumstances that require empathy or that require us to adjust based on a particular circumstance, that's where our customer care agents come into play and can make adjustments based on that.

We want all complicated claims to go through a person for review. For wellness claims where you go to the doctor, you get the wellness benefit, which we’ve been able to fully automate. For cancer, a critical illness or a hospital visit, we always want the human characteristic and human component to review that claim to make sure that the care aspect is in there. Because computers can only do what they're programmed or what they learn to do. They're never going to be able to exhibit empathy or to understand a situation that might require a different way of handling than just an ordinary claim. That's really important to us because of this model of care on purpose and making sure that we care about our customers and policyholders, and deliver for them.

How well has that approach worked? How effective has it been?

The digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. We are well along that journey. But we're far from where we want to be. Even though we're in the insurance industry, we like to compare ourselves with companies like Amazon and Google. They're the trailblazers. So we want to position ourselves as the trailblazer within insurance and be viewed as a digital leader. Our position will always be leading edge from an insurance perspective, but maybe behind from a Google and an Amazon perspective. So we're continuously learning and continuously adapting, but the thing that's most important is not necessarily the tools or technology, it's how well are you serving your customer.

Our technology journey will never end, and there will always be the next digital activity that we are driving. We’re trying to increase our overall customer satisfaction and our ease metrics. That’s about processing a claim in a timely way.

Have you identified operational functions where you must apply digital capabilities, such as AI?

Enterprise intelligent automation is about making innovations practical, putting them in play at scale throughout the company. We started with claims. We rolled out our code-based processing model in September of last year. We're going through each of our different product lines–accident, then hospitalization, then disability, then cancer, which is the most complicated. After the claims process, it’s moving that technology to billing and servicing. Our goal is to go through each process and ask how we use enterprise intelligent automation to transform this process and modernize our company.

For example, touchless claims, where you as a policyholder can opt in for us to get your medical records or your electronic health and medical records. We'll mine those records for an event and auto-file a claim for you. Then we can put it through the process automatically. If you go to the hospital today and a medical record is filed tomorrow, we’d love to get that information in real-time and process the claim. By the time you get home the next day, we have a notification on your phone saying, 'Sorry that XYZ has happened. We want you to know that your money's been deposited in your account.' We're not there from a technology perspective. But that's where we see us going in the next three to five years.

That's really the horizon, to serve our customers' needs before they ask us to. Touchless claims was born out of not wanting policyholders to worry about filing a claim and getting money in their time of need. We continuously improve our claims process to make it simpler and easier to file claims. In the end, that’s really what matters.

It's all around business outcomes. Technology for technology's sake is very low value. But digital transformation to drive towards business outcomes and business value is really where the value proposition is fulfilled.