Alfac’s call center is 450 employees deep, and artificial intelligence is a prime tool to help agents give detailed information to the 15,000 calls the supplemental insurance brand receives daily, said Keith Farley, Senior Vice President, Individual Voluntary Benefits.
Aflac started a company-wide pilot with a major generative AI chat platform in November 2025, which runs for six months. Farley declined to reveal which gen AI platform but said it was one of the major companies. About 300 employees are a part of that pilot in departments including marketing, claims, finance and legal. For the call center, Aflac is having the AI listen in on the call and provide agents with information they are talking about that employees would normally have to look up themselves.
“[The agents are] able to service people faster and really they can focus on being present in the conversation and not having to constantly be thinking about, ‘What’s this answer? What’s that answer?’” Farley said.
The generative AI tool will also automatically update the customer’s address if he or she provides a new one, instead of having the agent take the time to update it. Aflac has two U.S.-based call centers, all with its own employees.
Aflac Aims for AI to Increase its Customer Satisfaction Score
The insurance brand will evaluate if the pilot is a success if it increases the customer satisfaction score, commonly known as the “CSAT.” The insurance provider does not have a target increase but it aims for customers to notice the difference of how smart and fast its agents are.
“Early results have been promising,” Farley said. “The amazing thing is how quickly the AI advances itself. If you asked me 30 days ago what the results are versus today, it just continues to get better the further we go and the more volume we give it.”
The AI tool also may help the “first call resolution” metric, which is if an agent can meet all of a customer’s needs in one call. However, this is a murky metric to look at in the insurance industry, Farley said. Many people are calling with an ongoing medical treatment or need, and make multiple calls because their situation is continually changing. This is why the CSAT score will be the true bellwether of success.
“What we’ve found is the time that we have freed up allows us to have that deeper conversation and build that relationship with that customer where they’ve got less of a wait time to get through because we’ve kept our staffing the same,” he said. “So now you’ve got shorter wait times because of the advance that we’re having.”
The AI Pilot is ‘Not A Cost Optimization Exercise’
The pilot is not a “cost optimization exercise,” and Aflac will plan to keep its staffing levels to appropriately match its call volume, Farley said.
“Instead of just replacing the human, we’re saying, why don’t we empower the human and make a bionic human that has all of the answers that can help you so that [agents] can stay focused and empathetic in the conversation,” he said.
About two in three customer service calls are from policy holders and the remaining third is from distributors, such as independent agents or brokerage firms. While Aflac does have some automation in its call centers, a human is likely handling some part of these 15,000 daily calls, as many consumers prefer to talk to a human when they are discussing their own health and medical treatments.
“There’s a lot of people that never want to talk to a human except for when they’ve had a heart attack or a stroke, and that’s exactly when they want to talk to humans,” he said.
Why Aflac Is Careful With AI
While Aflac has several paths for consumer to do self service, it’s not for complicated issues. The brand is looking into adding AI into self service for transactional tasks. However, the brand has to be careful where it adds AI, as insurance is a regulated industry dealing with health and finances and it has to ensure all the information is correct. Aflac also wants to maintain a good standard of providing empathy to its customers, Farley said.
“I remind my team that the first word in AI is artificial. And sometimes when you’ve been diagnosed with a scary disease, you want something that’s authentic, not artificial,” Farley said.
The Aflac mobile app handles 18,000 claims a day, which is 85% of all of the insurer’s claims. This is a large majority, but that still means people will call in for 15% of claims.
Aflac Debuts ‘VIP’ Cancer Diagnosis Line
Another enhancement Aflac made to its customer service center was a dedicated team that only handles claims from people who have had a first-time cancer diagnosis.
Since Q1 2024, Aflac has a recording that says, “If your call is regarding a first-time cancer diagnosis, please press one.” Those customers are then transferred to a line of a dedicated team of 17 employees who are emotionally ready to handle that difficult call, Farley said. Aflac aims to provide as much support to these people calling with one of the most difficult diagnoses, he said.
While Farley initially planned to have the team rotate every month — so it wouldn’t be too mentally taxing on them — the team advocated to stay in the position as they feel they are making a difference and like taking the important call, he said.
Dedicated Line Is A Low-Cost Win
In fact, the team also now will send a care package to customers if the situation is especially difficult, which was another idea the team had, Farley said. Aflac does not use AI in this line, nor does it plan to add it, as the goal is to preserve the human touch during a difficult call, Farley said.
This VIP line did not cost anything extra for Aflac to implement; it only had to reorganize its resources, he said.
After a year with this dedicated VIP line, the CSAT for these customers is about seven percentage points higher than Aflac’s overall CSAT, which is significant, Farley said. He declined to share Aflac’s average CSAT score.
Another impact of this change is the policy holder having a positive, or hassle-free, customer experience when filing the claim. This impact is hard to measure, but Farley is confident it only helps.
“If you’re all at the same employer that offers the cancer policy in this example, we feel that that’s a very important person from a word-of-mouth marketing standpoint,” he said. “The experience that they have is obviously not only important for them, but for our other current or potential customers that sit in the same office.”
Aflac’s Recent Marketing Initiatives
With the generative AI pilot, Aflac’s marketing team is looking to infuse AI into storyboards and generating concepts for testing. This will allow the marketers to move faster and to quickly show ideas before they go to fruition.
A few years ago, Aflac built its own in-house studio so it could quickly pump out marketing content, which is needed as social media trends change in real time. The studio is still working well, Farley said.
