Read this article about Aflac, one of our finalists, in the category Operational Excellence Outstanding Leader of the Year Award, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

For more than six decades, Aflac insurance policies have given policyholders the opportunity to focus on recovery, not financial stress. In the United States, Aflac is the leader in voluntary insurance sales at the worksite. When a policyholder gets sick or hurt, Aflac pays cash benefits fast.

Customers are at the heart of Aflac’s business. Virgil Miller, executive vice president and chief operations officer (COO) of Aflac U.S. and president of Aflac Group, wanted to build upon Aflac’s strong customer service reputation. Doing so required driving operational excellence across the entire customer journey, ensuring the customer is at the center of all decisions.

The team identified three key objects:

• Understand the target consumer better than anyone else;
• Create the right solutions for the right customers;
• Provide Aflac’s customers with an effortless service experience 24/7 on device-agnostic platforms.
  
  

Virgil and his team of more than 3,400 employees across four teams – Innovation, Customer Experience, IT and the Transformation Office – along with various third-party vendors focused on developing and implementing digital solutions to improve Aflac’s customer-facing technologies and processes. The team focused on three key areas:

• Harness digital to enhance customer experiences and exceed expectations.
• Seamlessly integrate channels across sales and service.
• Reduce effort for customers when interacting with Aflac.
  
  

To be successful, Virgil sought to instill a culture of innovation. He did this by motivating the team to have a customer mindset, asking questions like “How does this impact the customer?” He encouraged everyone to be a customer advocate, reminding them that if Aflac doesn’t change to accommodate customers, others will. Lastly, he aligned the team’s processes and goals to the customer experience (CX) strategy.

Under Virgil, Aflac released new online and mobile features, including the launch of a mobile claims app that allows customers to file claims from their mobile device for easy submission, made customer product updates and improvements to the sales teams’ tools. This has resulted in in a more seamless customer experience, higher rates of customer satisfaction and retention, and greater profitability. For instance, customer metrics such as overall customer ease were up 7 points; overall customer satisfaction, up 8 points; and customer’s likeliness to recommend, up 7 points. Within his first six months of taking on leadership of Aflac Group, Virgil moved the profit margin from -2% to 5.3%, and then to 8% (a 10 PPT improvement), even while absorbing the cost of the Aflac Transformation team’s efforts and launching new technology systems. Tracking against their future customer journey map, Virgil and the Aflac team continues to innovate and transform the customer experience, regularly launching new customer service features and enhancements.