Specialized CX Starts With One: Lessons From Aflac's Cancer Care Hotline
Originally published by CMSWire
One team. One mission. One customer segment. Aflac's hotline for newly diagnosed cancer patients proves that going deeper is the key to meaningful support.
The Gist
Customer experience is never one-size-fits-all. That is especially true for customers who require specialized support or solutions tailored to their specific needs. They may have unique challenges or require a deeper level of care compared to your typical customer.
A couple years ago, my organization introduced what we now call the Aflac Cancer Care Hotline, a dedicated customer service line for policyholders who contact us with a first-time cancer diagnosis. This service gives policyholders the option to connect with a customer care specialist specifically trained to respond to calls with individuals facing cancer for the first time.
Since its inception, our team has responded with care and compassion to nearly 150,000 calls from policyholders navigating the physical, emotional and financial impacts of cancer.
Based on our learnings from creating the hotline, here's how to identify customers within your organization who require additional support and how to build out the infrastructure to serve their needs.
Start By Prioritizing One Customer Segment
As with any business decision, offering specialized support to certain customers must be aligned with your values. Leaders can start by asking themselves, 'What is the experience we've committed to providing to our customers, and how can we build on it and do it better?'
After completing this exercise, you may identify more than one type of customer that needs extra support, and prioritization may be necessary. Rather than try to address all these customers at once, pick one segment to focus on first, and then apply your learnings to others. You want to start where you can create the biggest impact, and it is up to each organization to define what impact means to them.
Providing this additional support may not affect the speed at which you're able to serve customers or the number of calls you're able to field within a given time frame, so the impact may be measured instead by the long-term emotional effects of meeting these customers' particular needs.
At my organization, the decision to focus specifically on policyholders who have been diagnosed with cancer was an easy one. Cancer insurance is one of the first products we introduced, two years after our company's founding. Our culture centers around being there for our customers during their times of need, and few events are as disruptive as a cancer diagnosis from a physical, emotional and financial standpoint.
Gather Insights From Frontline Employees
Employees who are on the front lines and who speak with customers daily are the ones who are the most aware of customers' challenges and ways to reduce friction. Once you have made a decision to focus on a specific customer segment , frontline employees are an important resource to brainstorm and pressure-test ideas. They can also help identify those customers who need additional support.
The Aflac Cancer Care Hotline was born out of a brainstorming session with our call center specialists, who identified a key insight. A cancer diagnosis is challenging in many ways, but understanding and using your insurance benefits should not be one of those challenges. These employees, who have more direct interactions with current and prospective customers than anyone else, recognized that our policyholders with cancer require specialized support.
Concentrate on Your Strongest Areas
By now, you have identified a specific type of customer to focus on, and you have identified their pain points with the help of the employees who work with them directly. But here's the thing. Your organization probably cannot solve everything. Instead, look at where you are uniquely qualified to help, and lean into that.
Sadly, my organization cannot change a policyholder's cancer diagnosis. We can't even influence the outcome of their treatment. But what we can do is provide a level of specialized compassion and expertise as we help these policyholders navigate our claims process. What we can do is make sure that every time a policyholder with cancer calls us, they speak with a human being who understands what they are going through and helps them get the most out of their insurance policies. This focus area makes sense because it aligns with our overall value proposition to provide financial assistance to our policyholders so they can focus more on treatment and recovery.
Train Employees for Specialized Roles
Working with a niche group of customers requires specific skills, knowledge and training. This includes developing a deep understanding of their unique challenges and needs, as well as expertise on how your organization's products or services will benefit them. For this reason, the employees who are best suited to work with these customers are probably ones who have been with your organization for some time.
Once these employees have been specifically trained for their new role, it's important to follow up with continuous microlearnings that reinforce key values and help them keep up with customers' changing circumstances and needs.
For the Aflac Cancer Care Hotline, we asked for volunteers among our senior customer experience specialists. While this was not a prerequisite, many of these volunteers have been personally affected by cancer in some way and were already deeply empathetic toward our policyholders. Our original plan was to rotate these employees to a different customer experience team every 30 days, since we did not want them to burn out. But when the time came, no one wanted to leave the cancer care team. They knew they were making a difference, and they were proud of the work they were doing.
Key Elements of Specialized Customer Support Programs
This table outlines strategic components organizations can use to build tailored support experiences for niche customer segments.
Share Knowledge Across Departments
The people who work closely with these customers become the experts. It's important to listen to them, give them autonomy to do their jobs effectively and share their key learnings with others. Developing a process to share these learnings with your organization's sales, research and development, and marketing teams will help you continuously improve the support and services you provide to all customers.
If something works well, build on it. The employees who manage our Cancer Care Hotline hold a weekly meeting to talk about the calls they fielded and any challenges that arose. During one of these meetings, they came up with the idea of sending care packages to some of these policyholders as another way of showing our support. Our entire organization has benefited from their extensive knowledge of our cancer insurance plans and their deep empathy toward our customers.
If providing a best-in-class customer experience is one of your core business values, offering specialized support to customers who need it helps you consistently deliver on that promise. By identifying the right customers to focus on, working closely with those who know them best, equipping frontline employees with training and resources, consistently improving processes and building on successes, every organization can build the infrastructure required to effectively serve niche customers.
Creating this type of program requires time and investment, but, done correctly, it builds goodwill with customers, differentiates your organization from competitors and serves as a powerful way to demonstrate your values in action to employees.
Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Aflac Incorporated
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
34 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Top Steelers NFL draft prospect LaNorris Sellers passes up huge NIL deal
The top priority of the Pittsburgh Steelers scouting staff this college football season is to sort out what is already shaping up to be an elite quarterback class for the 2026 NFL draft. Thanks to the ridiculous nature of NIL money, the NFL now has another aspect of players to track and that's their loyalty to their team as opposed to making fast money in college football. One of the top quarterback prospects in the upcoming draft is LaNorris Sellers out of South Carolina. News came out about Sellers this week and thanks to some intervention by his dad, Sellers chose to pass up $8 million over two years in NIL money to stay. According to Sellers' dad, there were multiple schools bidding for his services, but he showed maturity and loyalty by staying, which is a huge green flag for an NFL team. Advertisement From a football standpoint, Sellers is poised for a huge breakout season. His athleticism and mobility are already off the charts and as the season progressed, we saw his pocket presence and processing speed improve drastically down the stretch. Sellers and Clemson's Cade Klubnik are my top two options for the Steelers and this move by Sellers just helps his case. This article originally appeared on Steelers Wire: Steelers NFL draft prospect LaNorris Sellers passes up huge NIL deal
Yahoo
35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Franklin County home listings asked for more money in May - see the current median price here
The median home in Franklin County listed for $364,900 in May, up 1.2% from the previous month's $360,720, an analysis of data from shows. Compared to May 2024, the median home list price increased 13.2% from $324,723. The statistics in this article only pertain to houses listed for sale in Franklin County, not houses that were sold. Information on your local housing market, along with other useful community data, is available at Franklin County's median home was 1,968 square feet, listed at $183 per square foot. The price per square foot of homes for sale is up 2.2% from May 2024. Listings in Franklin County moved briskly, at a median 36 days listed compared to the May national median of 51 days on the market. In the previous month, homes had a median of 38 days on the market. Around 196 homes were newly listed on the market in May, a 7.7% increase from 182 new listings in May 2024. The median home prices issued by may exclude many, or even most, of a market's homes. The price and volume represent only single-family homes, condominiums or townhomes. They include existing homes, but exclude most new construction as well as pending and contingent sales. In Pennsylvania, median home prices were $325,000, a slight increase from April. The median Pennsylvania home listed for sale had 1,708 square feet, with a price of $196 per square foot. Throughout the United States, the median home price was $440,000, a slight increase from the month prior. The median American home for sale was listed at 1,840 square feet, with a price of $234 per square foot. The median home list price used in this report represents the midway point of all the houses or units listed over the given period of time. Experts say the median offers a more accurate view of what's happening in a market than the average list price, which would mean taking the sum of all listing prices then dividing by the number of homes sold. The average can be skewed by one particularly low or high price. The USA TODAY Network is publishing localized versions of this story on its news sites across the country, generated with data from Please leave any feedback or corrections for this story here. This story was written by Ozge Terzioglu. Our News Automation and AI team would like to hear from you. Take this survey and share your thoughts with us. This article originally appeared on Waynesboro Record Herald: Franklin County home listings asked for more money in May - see the current median price here
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trust in AI is growing in finance, especially behind the scenes
This story was originally published on CX Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CX Dive newsletter. A majority of customers trust the use of AI in behind-the-scenes tasks at financial institutions, according to a TD Bank survey conducted by Ipsos released Tuesday. Among the 2,500 U.S. consumers polled, 70% are comfortable with technology being used for fraud detection, and 64% are comfortable with it being used in credit score calculations. Consumers also believe that AI should offer more ease. Two-thirds believe it can expand access to financial tools, and nearly half expect benefits from AI like 24/7 banking access. As consumers have become more familiar with AI tools, their trust in the technology has slowly grown. Nearly 7 in 10 consumers say they are at least somewhat familiar with AI — a finding seen in other surveys, too. Notably, half of consumers trust that AI will provide reliable, competent information, trusting AI just as much as news stations. But consumers are more comfortable with AI in specific use cases and the more complex or sensitive the matter, the more they want to speak to a human or know that a human will be reviewing AI before making any decisions. Consumers are less inclined to want to only use AI when it comes to tasks that one might typically use a financial adviser for, according Ted Paris, EVP, TD Bank AMCB, and head of analytics, intelligence & AI. When it comes to personal finance, 3 in 5 of consumers were comfortable with the idea of using AI financial tools for budgeting and automating savings goals. But less than half were comfortable with more complex tasks like retirement planning and investing. Banks enjoy high consumer trust — more than 4 in 5 consumers trust banks for accurate information. As they deploy AI, it's important that they maintain that, Paris said. 'What's probably the key piece, is creating and enabling and allowing customers and colleagues to feel that they can trust the outcomes of what this capability then generates,' Paris said. One of the ways TD Bank is approaching this is by always having a human in the loop, meaning that the output of an AI solution will be passed through some internal expert before going to a client. 'We need to make sure that first, anything that we're doing is directed toward a particular need,' Paris said. 'We need to make sure that this is going to meet all hurdles that we would set, legal, regulatory, for security and privacy.' Sign in to access your portfolio
