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 focus matters. Identifying one specific customer segment to serve deeply can create greater impact and align with your core values.
• Frontline insights vital. Employees who engage directly with customers offer critical perspectives on unique needs and ways to improve support.
• Specialized care counts. Training the right employees to provide tailored support builds stronger relationships and improves the overall experience.

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.