Aflac’s approach to Gen Z engagement

The way customers make purchases and interact with brands is changing. Food, personal items and even cars are ordered through a screen. How do these shifts in behavior impact a more complicated service like insurance? And how does digital engagement connect back to branding?

We recently spoke with Keith Farley, a marketer with experience at big brands like Coca-Cola and Stanley Black+Decker. He’s currently SVP of individual voluntary benefits at Aflac, known as a force in the branding world due to its iconic Aflac Duck commercials (voiced by the late comedian Gilbert Gottfried), introduced a quarter-century ago.

Customers born just before or after the debut of the memorable Aflac Duck are known as Gen Z and are a much sought after health insurance demographic. If all goes well, they could be longtime clients and not make many claims for years.

Gen Z, though not a monolith, holds different expectations about engaging with brands than previous cohorts. That means the right message, or the right service, over the right channel impacts referrals and grows brand appreciation. For Aflac, the positive impressions are all connected across the customer journey. And although Gen Z is leading some of these changes, all customers have changed their behaviors in recent years, according to Farley.

“With Gen Z, there’s this assumption that everything is digital and they never want to talk to a human again — and that’s true in a lot of cases,” said Farley. “When it comes to ordering a pizza, or booking a flight, but not when you receive a diagnosis for cancer. Now, you want to talk to a human. Sometimes, as a brand, we meet people on their darkest day.”

Mobile-first consumers

An important metric for the relevance of mobile engagement for brands is the number of consumers who make big-ticket purchases over mobile. It’s a sign of the high amount of trust consumers have in mobile channels as they use their phones to get more things done in their digital lives.

Sixty-two percent of consumers said they trusted phones over personal computers and tablets, according to a recent survey of 2,000 consumers conducted by ecommerce software company StoreConnect. Twenty-five percent said they trust desktops or laptops the most; under 12% trusted tablets the most.

This doesn’t mean that Gen Z trusts mobile more than older customers. In the same survey, 64.2% of Millennials (age 25-34) said they trust mobile to book flights and vacation rentals, while 53% of consumers 18-25 said so.v

It might be that Millennials have more experience than Gen Z in booking vacations generally, so they have more confidence in mobile and payment apps to complete these transactions. But it’s clear that consumers of all ages expect to have the choice to engage with brands, regardless of whether it’s a simple product or a more complex process like filing an insurance claim.

Different channels for different outcomes

“With Aflac, we don’t have a physical product — you can’t touch it, you can’t feel it, you can’t taste it, you can’t hold it,” said Farley. “But we still look at it from the perspective of what a customer wants. Do they want all the latest and greatest technology, or when they’re diagnosed with a dreaded disease, do they want to talk to a human?”

Aflac branding thrives on social media and through mass-market campaigns. But there is a firm line between marketing to new and existing customers and customer service for incoming claims. From the consumer’s perspective, it might all be connected. Internally, Aflac keeps these two operations separate.

“Obviously, the way we market to people and the way we reach them from a sales and marketing perspective might be very different than on the back end,” Farley said. “When you’re being marketed to, things are running smoothly in your life. You haven’t had a stroke or a heart attack. What’s the medium and what’s the tone that they want when something bad has happened?”

To protect users’ privacy, Aflac handles claims over secure communications that include email, chat and phone.

“Sometimes we do have folks who want service through a social platform — although what you’ll find is because of the nature of the private health information, people don’t want to put it out there, and obviously we’re required to not discuss your diagnosis on a social channel,” said Farley.

Boosting engagement and net promoter score with customer experience

Gen Z and Millennial consumers are open to making purchases on an app, as we saw above. They are also working in a job market where direct-to-consumer purchases for insurance are more prevalent. 

“The Consumer Markets division allows people to buy insurance directly from us and not through an employer,” said Farley. “That has always been a very small amount in the past, but we see it growing now as you’ve got gig workers and folks that are not in traditional employment. That’s the reality. We know that people work in many different ways. It’s been a growing area for us.”

Aflac customers can go through an entire digital flow to purchase insurance without ever speaking to a human agent. Customers answer the relevant questions, make a payment and receive a policy. And if they prefer to file a claim digitally, they can follow a similar digital flow through the same Aflac mobile app.

“However you want to access us, we really have to be there in an omnichannel way,” Farley said.

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For younger Gen Z customers, that might be the only time they engage with Aflac. But in an effort to promote good health, Aflac offers an annual wellness benefit. This provides a minimal relationship with customers through the course of an otherwise uneventful year. With this benefit, customers are offered a cash payout (the amount differs from state to state) once the customer visits a physician for a yearly checkup.

“Eighty percent of those (wellness claims) come through our mobile app, and we pay in seconds because it’s an automated claim for us,” said Farley.

He added: “We don’t want anyone to get sick or hurt, obviously, but we do want people to experience the product. That’s why we encourage people to go through the process (of the wellness claim) because we find that when they do, they’re a customer for life.”

This program is supported by email reminders, which offers another channel over which Aflac get in front of customers.

When people click through and make their wellness claim, net promoter scores improve, according to Farley.

Social media awareness for minor claims

Aflac isn’t wishing illness or injury on a customer, of course, but the act of filing a claim, when an event does occur, “closes the loop on the promise the company made,” said Farley.

That means the company promotes its seamless claim process on social media by providing examples of minor claims customers can make. For instance, if someone sprains their ankle at work and sees a doctor for treatment, that’s an accident that would be included under an accident policy. If the customer heals quickly, they might not think about filing a claim. But Aflac wants them to.

Only when the customer goes through the process of filing a claim, or of making a purchase for insurance, can this customer appreciate the superior omnichannel experience. So if something happens, however minor, the company wants to be top-of-mind and have the opportunity to deliver and achieve customer success.

“If you ever have a bad day, we’re going to be there,” Farley said. “Give us a chance to be there for you.”

In this way, through marketing programs on social and in the inbox, Aflac can gently remind younger uneventful customers that the company is ready to help.

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