Aflac Automates Email Processing with AI: A contact center transformation

Challenges

Aflac faced inefficiencies in handling email inquiries:

• Manual Workload: Processing thousands of weekly emails across seven inboxes, requiring manual classification and assignment of work, burdened contact center agents.
• Slow Response Times: Manual classification and assignment hindered timely customer service.
• Scalability Concerns: A growing email volume, owing to a rapidly shifting global environment, threatened to overwhelm existing processes.

Solution

In its effort to transform and reinvent the way it connects with customers, agents, and policyholders, Aflac devised its “One Digital Aflac” vision, with a distinct focus on customer-centricity. As part of this vision, Aflac leveraged AI-powered email bot technology within its Pega Customer Service™ application to improve overall email productivity, contain more inquiries, and resolve customers’ issues faster. addressed these challenges:

• Automated Processing: The bot automatically classifies and assigns emails to cases.
• Streamlined Resolution: The bot leverages NLP to understand email context and sentiment, enabling faster and more accurate automated responses and classifications.
• Intelligent Responses: It can automatically classify and assign emails to cases and can even use an email bot to respond to less complex inquiries that don’t require an agent interaction.
• Agent Efficiency: AI-generated suggestions expedite agent resolution for remaining emails.

The Impact

Aflac's AI solution delivered significant improvements: