aflac
AFLAC Case Study
Background A Fortune 500 Company, AFLAC insures more than 40 million people worldwide. At yearend 2001, the corporation’s total assets were $37 billion, with annual revenues of more than $9.6 billion. AFLAC is a leading writer of insurance marketed at the worksite, offering policies to employees at more than 230,000 payroll accounts in the United States. In January 2002, AFLAC was the number one insurance company in Fortune magazine’s list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” and was also named the sixth most admired company in the life and health insurance sector in Fortune’s annual listing of “America’s Most Admired Companies.” Based at the company’s Columbus, Ga., headquarters, AFLAC’s call center has a staff of about 300 representatives and fields an average of 20,000 calls per day or roughly 400,000 calls each month. Nearly half of the calls are from AFLAC’s 40,000 sales associates around the world, who call with a variety of procedural and policy questions. About 40 percent of the callers are policyholders and the remaining callers come from businesses that offer AFLAC products to their employees.
Business Issue In early 1998, AFLAC developed a consolidated flow chart of the various business processes, from developing a product to actually servicing a customer, to determine where efficiency could be increased. The focus of this effort quickly narrowed to the first point of contact with a customer. “The call center is obviously a big part of that,” says Mary Daniel, technical manager of AFLAC’s call center. “We’re pretty high up on the pyramid in terms of importance since we are on the front lines of customer contact.” With a mission to “exceed our customers expectations at every moment of truth by combining commitment, technology and superior job knowledge,” Daniel says her team began looking at a wide variety of software and hardware option to increase the efficiency of the call center and to provide customers with more options to make sure they’re getting the very best customer service available. From the time the toll-free customer line was established in 1992 to early 1999, AFLAC’s call center used manually operated cassette tape recorders to monitor and tape customer service calls. “The arcane system was difficult to use,” says Daniel. “Supervisors often found that calls were either only partially recorded or often not at all.”
Magnifying Customer Success
Case Study
AFLAC Case Study Business Solution What AFLAC required was an easy-to-use automated recording and tracking system that could interface with the call center’s workforce management software, reducing the workload on supervisors and creating a detailed record of customer contact sessions. After looking at several options, AFLAC purchased e-talk Recorder‘ in August 1999 and etalk Advisor™ in February 2000. Shorten the Learning Curve “etalk was the best fit for AFLAC,” says Daniel. “The ROI offered by the system was high and it could work with our other systems. In addition, the level of training and customer service was over and above what the other vendors offered us.” As the system was installed at AFLAC, critical personnel throughout the call center were trained to use Recorder and Advisor, as well as the company’s IT staff. “etalk’s trainers were exemplary,” said Daniel. “They had a lot of patience with us and didn't seem to mind that our questions may have been fairly basic. When I attended training in 1999, the trainer got our e-mail addresses and sent training materials to the call center staff. That enabled us to distill materials down to basic fact sheets for the specialists. The trainer contacted us each month for the first six months to check on our progress, which was incredibly helpful and really above and beyond.” Complement Workforce Management Solutions Once installed, Recorder and Advisor became an integral part of the call center’s e-workforce management software, which contains each specialist’s schedule, including breaks, lunches and vacation time. The integrated system enables call center supervisors to set up automatic recording times based on a specialist’s schedule, something that was impossible with the completely manual system. “With Recorder and Advisor, AFLAC call center supervisors are able to increase the overall efficiency of the call center,” says Daniel. Recorder allows contact center managers to monitor and record an entire interaction between a customer and a call center representative. With Advisor, supervisors can generate reports to better evaluate the performance of each representative, which adds to their ability to manage and motivate the call center staff. Simplified Technology Transition Building on the success of its etalk implementation, AFLAC recently upgraded to the newest versions of Recorder and Advisor, and completed staff training on the new system. While software upgrades can be disruptive to the daily operations of many organizations, Daniel reported the upgrade process had little impact on the call center’s daily activities. “The upgrade has not been a painful process at all and the upgrades are great,” she said. “We now have the capability to do limited 24-by-7 recording so that when certain supervisors are observing calls, they’re automatically recorded, which we were unable to do before.”
e-talk Corporation 4040 West Royal # 100 Irving, TX 75063
© 2002 e-talk is a registered trademark of e-talk Corporation. etalk Survey, Recorder, Advisor, JASS, Expert and Qfiniti are trademarks of e-talk Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Background A Fortune 500 Company, AFLAC insures more than 40 million people worldwide. At yearend 2001, the corporation’s total assets were $37 billion, with annual revenues of more than $9.6 billion. AFLAC is a leading writer of insurance marketed at the worksite, offering policies to employees at more than 230,000 payroll accounts in the United States. In January 2002, AFLAC was the number one insurance company in Fortune magazine’s list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” and was also named the sixth most admired company in the life and health insurance sector in Fortune’s annual listing of “America’s Most Admired Companies.” Based at the company’s Columbus, Ga., headquarters, AFLAC’s call center has a staff of about 300 representatives and fields an average of 20,000 calls per day or roughly 400,000 calls each month. Nearly half of the calls are from AFLAC’s 40,000 sales associates around the world, who call with a variety of procedural and policy questions. About 40 percent of the callers are policyholders and the remaining callers come from businesses that offer AFLAC products to their employees.
Business Issue In early 1998, AFLAC developed a consolidated flow chart of the various business processes, from developing a product to actually servicing a customer, to determine where efficiency could be increased. The focus of this effort quickly narrowed to the first point of contact with a customer. “The call center is obviously a big part of that,” says Mary Daniel, technical manager of AFLAC’s call center. “We’re pretty high up on the pyramid in terms of importance since we are on the front lines of customer contact.” With a mission to “exceed our customers expectations at every moment of truth by combining commitment, technology and superior job knowledge,” Daniel says her team began looking at a wide variety of software and hardware option to increase the efficiency of the call center and to provide customers with more options to make sure they’re getting the very best customer service available. From the time the toll-free customer line was established in 1992 to early 1999, AFLAC’s call center used manually operated cassette tape recorders to monitor and tape customer service calls. “The arcane system was difficult to use,” says Daniel. “Supervisors often found that calls were either only partially recorded or often not at all.”
Magnifying Customer Success
Case Study
AFLAC Case Study Business Solution What AFLAC required was an easy-to-use automated recording and tracking system that could interface with the call center’s workforce management software, reducing the workload on supervisors and creating a detailed record of customer contact sessions. After looking at several options, AFLAC purchased e-talk Recorder‘ in August 1999 and etalk Advisor™ in February 2000. Shorten the Learning Curve “etalk was the best fit for AFLAC,” says Daniel. “The ROI offered by the system was high and it could work with our other systems. In addition, the level of training and customer service was over and above what the other vendors offered us.” As the system was installed at AFLAC, critical personnel throughout the call center were trained to use Recorder and Advisor, as well as the company’s IT staff. “etalk’s trainers were exemplary,” said Daniel. “They had a lot of patience with us and didn't seem to mind that our questions may have been fairly basic. When I attended training in 1999, the trainer got our e-mail addresses and sent training materials to the call center staff. That enabled us to distill materials down to basic fact sheets for the specialists. The trainer contacted us each month for the first six months to check on our progress, which was incredibly helpful and really above and beyond.” Complement Workforce Management Solutions Once installed, Recorder and Advisor became an integral part of the call center’s e-workforce management software, which contains each specialist’s schedule, including breaks, lunches and vacation time. The integrated system enables call center supervisors to set up automatic recording times based on a specialist’s schedule, something that was impossible with the completely manual system. “With Recorder and Advisor, AFLAC call center supervisors are able to increase the overall efficiency of the call center,” says Daniel. Recorder allows contact center managers to monitor and record an entire interaction between a customer and a call center representative. With Advisor, supervisors can generate reports to better evaluate the performance of each representative, which adds to their ability to manage and motivate the call center staff. Simplified Technology Transition Building on the success of its etalk implementation, AFLAC recently upgraded to the newest versions of Recorder and Advisor, and completed staff training on the new system. While software upgrades can be disruptive to the daily operations of many organizations, Daniel reported the upgrade process had little impact on the call center’s daily activities. “The upgrade has not been a painful process at all and the upgrades are great,” she said. “We now have the capability to do limited 24-by-7 recording so that when certain supervisors are observing calls, they’re automatically recorded, which we were unable to do before.”
e-talk Corporation 4040 West Royal # 100 Irving, TX 75063
© 2002 e-talk is a registered trademark of e-talk Corporation. etalk Survey, Recorder, Advisor, JASS, Expert and Qfiniti are trademarks of e-talk Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
