Aflac virtualizes the customer enrollment experience

At the outset of the pandemic, Aflac’s independent agent/franchise business looked to be a dead duck. The traditional in-person process of insurance agents meeting with prospective customers to discuss policies, sign paperwork, and load it into the company’s client/server system came to a complete halt. While Aflac’s other major division, its business-to-business insurance line, was relatively unaffected by the pandemic, its independent agents hung in the balance, just as the publicly traded company was undertaking a transformational journey to the cloud. “Because we are an insurance company, what we are is a promise on a piece of paper,” says then-CIO Richard Gilbert. “We had launched a large user-centric, customer-focused transformation with the technology projects we were doing, but then the pandemic hit and changed everything for us.”