A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference in Dubai on the topic of failure, fumbles, and fiascos in customer experience.
One of the central themes of my talk was that more often than not, we design customer experiences that cater to the majority of cases.
However, sometimes things go wrong due to poor assumptions, a lack of due care and attention, or an over-adherence to process and rules rather than common sense, and, in turn, they can generate, at a minimum, lots of complaints.
Many companies are not very good at handling complaints. But the ones that do, see them as an opportunity to learn and make things better for their customers.
The Leader Who Starts Every Day with Complaints
This idea came to mind recently when I was chatting with Keith Farley, Senior Vice President of Individual Voluntary Benefits at Aflac, a leading provider of supplemental insurance policies for both individuals and groups that help cover expenses that major medical insurance policies may not cover.
In our conversation, Farley told me that he starts every workday by reading customer complaints.
He does this, he says, because he knows that with 50 million policyholders worldwide, complaints happen, but also to better understand “what our service failures are,” and where changes need to be made.
To balance things out, he says he also tries, on Friday afternoons, to read “the happy notes that customers send,” thus allowing him to go into the weekend with what we did well this week.
In addition, he says that he regularly listens to customer calls because he says, “you really just get to hear in a very raw way exactly what people are thinking and saying. That kind of feedback is gold.
“You can have all the surveys and all the quantitative stuff, but the qualitative stuff is where you can hear the emotion and really understand what people are thinking.”
On hearing this, I suggested that, in my experience, there are three levels of leadership in this regard:
- The first level involves leaders using data to guide their decision-making.
- The second level adds customer stories to the mix, helping them emotionally connect with customer feedback and accelerating their response.
- The third level of leadership occurs when leaders experience failure, either directly or through reading complaints, listening to calls, talking to customers, or actually helping them in real time. This makes their experience very real and compels them to take action.
The 15-Cent Lesson Behind a Career in Customer Experience
He agrees and says that he learned very early in his career when he was a young field marketer at DeWalt over 20 years ago selling circular saws.
Now, back then, circular saws normally came with an eight-foot power cord as standard.
However, if you were cutting a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, either diagonally or lengthwise, you’ll end up hitting the plug as you finish. This could disrupt your cut and result in a funny angle.
Now, if you had an extension cord, then you would avoid that situation, but they listened to customer feedback, and as a product development team, they decided to make it so that their cutting tools came with a 10-foot cord as standard to help customers avoid those situations.
The cost to extend the cord by two feet: 15 cents. The impact on the customer: massive.
Farley explains that he was 22 at the time, and that what he learned in that field marketing job with DeWalt was that you could sit around with all the DeWalt engineers in Baltimore, Maryland, trying to figure out what the customer wants.
Or, you could just spend time on job sites to listen to customer feedback, which the team at DeWalt regularly did.
That’s when he realized, very early in his career, that “the customer will tell you exactly what they want. You just have to be there to listen.”
Why Aflac Deploys AI with Caution — and Purpose
I believe this sort of experience informs everything Farley does and shapes his work at Aflac. For example, when I asked how Aflac is using AI in its customer operations, he replied: “with caution.”
He adds that “the reason why I really want to be cautious in adopting AI is I want to make sure that it’s improving the customer experience, not replacing the customer experience.”
That does not mean that Farley isn’t a supporter of the more extensive use of AI in customer operations. Not at all. In fact, he says that if you are dealing with a straightforward job to be done, like ordering a pizza, then it should be AI all the way.
And, in fact, they are using it to help with claim pre-processing, given that about 85% of their claims come through their mobile app.
In practice, this means they use it for policy validation, confirming that the policy is all paid up, current, and covers the details mentioned in the claim, before passing it to a human.
Doing it this way allows, as Farley explains, to “let our humans do the things that are uniquely human.”
In their business – which sells products including cancer insurance, hospital insurance, and accident insurance – when a customer calls, they are often having, as Farley describes it, “maybe the worst day of their life.”
He adds that while “it might be more efficient to turn them over to an AI to handle their situation, I remind my team that the first word in AI is artificial.
And when you’re hurt or sick, sometimes you want a different A, and that is authentic.”
I like that, and it’s clear from speaking to Farley that he and his team at Aflac are very intentional about their use of AI.
It demonstrates what can be achieved when you listen to your customers, act on their feedback, and connect everything you do to customer outcomes.
