Aflac Life Insurance Japan bags two accolades at the Insurance Asia Awards 2022

The company installed a system that allows customers to select their preferred agents based on their needs.

Aflac Japan has snatched both the Digital Insurance Initiative of the Year-Japan and Insurtech Initiative of the Year-Japan accolades at the 2022 Insurance Asia Awards. The prestigious award gathers Asia's leading insurance companies and recognises their exceptional initiatives, products, and solutions that made the company prosper during challenging times.  

As digitisation continues to thrive, more customers will seek online insurance consultations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies, including startups, are compelled to provide new insurance products and services. However, there are geographical constraints on the agents’ activities, such as a failure to effectively use the available time of agents or difficulties in getting each agent to differentiate from the others.

To address this, Aflac Japan has led an initiative to develop an AI-based agent matching service to improve customer satisfaction with insurance consultations. Through the machine learning algorithm, compatibility between customers and agents can be determined and calculated.

In the platform, customers and agents must answer questions about their interests and preferences in advance. Based on the answer, AI will analyse the customer’s interests, preferences, needs, and location, as well as the agent’s characteristics, and suggest the best agent for the customer. 

As a result, customer satisfaction increases because they can now have insurance consultations with an agent with whom they feel comfortable. In addition, agents can know the interests and preferences of customers in advance so that they can start conversations with customers smoothly at the time of consultation.

This innovation is also expected to improve the insurance closing rate because customers can select an agent based on their needs.

Apart from the AI-based agent matching service, Aflac has also developed an agent training solution that allows agents to practice conversation with AI avatars to achieve results faster.

It can be recalled that before, the new agent training consisted of two parts: knowledge acquired through training and conversation exercises through role-playing. Role-playing requires a communication partner, and a manager would play this role. However, managers are busy and cannot devote enough time to role-playing. Also, since managers guide trainees based on their own experiences, there were differences in the quality of guidance among managers.

This agent training solution records analyses and evaluates role-playing results. During role-playing, the AI avatar reacts according to the conversation--improving the learning efficiency of inexperienced agents.

AI will analyse and report whether the agent was able to use the pre-registered vital keywords. By implementing self-improvement measures based on the report, new agents are equipped to carry out sales activities on their own at an earlier stage. 

Apart from that, managers who oversee training no longer have to play the other party's role, so they can effectively use their working hours. In addition, centralised management of role-playing training records and recorded videos per agent helped reduce management costs.

With this innovative solution, the average nursing care insurance sales by those who completed the training were more than double those who did not. Moreover, the time needed to train agents was reduced by 20 hours per month.

The Insurance Asia Awards 2022 is presented by Insurance Asia. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2023 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's outstanding retail initiatives, please contact Jane Patiag at jane@charltonmediamail.com.