Aflac One Day Pay Aims To Match The Speed Of Modern Consumers

Aflac is try­ing to sat­is­fy insur­ance cus­tomers, who don’t like to wait long for any­thing, with a sim­pli­fied sub­mis­sion process for claims.

Lisa Lacy By Lisa Lacy. Join the discussion » 0 comments

When it comes to speed records, ducks are hard­ly on par with, say, chee­tahs. But that hasn’t stopped sup­ple­men­tal insur­ance com­pa­ny Aflac and its spokes­duck from try­ing to sat­is­fy mod­ern cus­tomers who increas­ing­ly expect faster ser­vice with a sim­pli­fied sub­mis­sion process for claims that it says can result in pay­ments with­in 24 hours.


Sup­ple­men­tal insur­ance provider Aflac has intro­duced One Day Pay, an ini­tia­tive it says allows the com­pa­ny to receive, process, approve, and dis­burse pay­ments to pol­i­cy­hold­ers for eli­gi­ble claims with­in one busi­ness day.

That’s because the com­pa­ny has sim­pli­fied its claims sub­mis­sion process via online sys­tem Smart­Claim, which it says pro­vides easy-to-answer ques­tions to guide users. Once the ques­tions are answered, Smart­Claim iden­ti­fies the sup­port­ing doc­u­ments the pol­i­cy­hold­er needs to upload before the claim is sub­mit­ted and pro­cess­ing begins, the brand says.

If an eli­gi­ble claim is sub­mit­ted with all sup­port­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion via Smart­Claim by 3 p.m. ET Mon­day to Fri­day, Aflac says it will process, approve, and dis­burse pay­ment for the claim with­in one busi­ness day. To receive pay­ments faster, direct deposit enroll­ment is also avail­able.

Smart­Claim is avail­able for many indi­vid­ual claims, regard­less of whether they are sim­ple, mod­er­ate, or com­plex, Aflac says. That includes approx­i­mate­ly 70 per­cent of indi­vid­ual poli­cies in force, accord­ing to Michael Zuna, chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer at Aflac, not­ing Smart­Claim is not avail­able for short term dis­abil­i­ty (exclud­ing acci­dent and sick­ness rid­ers), life, vision, den­tal, Medicare sup­ple­ment, long-term care/home health care and health care reform rid­ers.

A lot of insur­ance com­pa­nies talk about how much mon­ey they’ll save pol­i­cy­hold­ers on pre­mi­ums, but peo­ple buy insur­ance to get paid,” Zuna said. “We make it a pri­or­i­ty to not only pay claims fast – but also process claims fast. We know that pol­i­cy­hold­ers who’ve had an ill­ness or acci­dent also have expens­es that won’t wait.”

In oth­er words, One Day Pay is an effort to sat­is­fy mod­ern cus­tomers who have come to expect imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion thanks in large part to the dig­i­tal realm. In fact, Aflac cites research that shows 81 per­cent of Face­book and Twit­ter users want a same-day response to ques­tions and com­plaints.

Along with this increased pace of life, con­sumers are pushed to bear more of the cost and respon­si­bil­i­ty for their health care in the new health care envi­ron­ment, so they expect more from their health care insur­ance part­ners than ever before,” Zuna said. “We under­stand that and for the past sev­en years, we’ve been pro­cess­ing and pay­ing most claims in an aver­age of four days. One Day Pay is sim­ply the nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion of the way we’ve been doing busi­ness.”

To pro­mote One Day Pay, Aflac says it is launch­ing “the largest, most inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing cam­paign in the com­pa­ny’s his­to­ry” and the brand will “bring the One Day Pay ini­tia­tive to life in com­pelling ways across a wide vari­ety of media.”

That includes skip­ping com­mer­cial breaks dur­ing tele­vi­sion events to bring view­ers back to the pro­gram­ming they want. This “accel­er­at­ed com­mer­cial break expe­ri­ence” debuted for view­ers watch­ing the E! “Live From the Red Car­pet” show pri­or to the Gram­mys on Feb­ru­ary 8 and will con­tin­ue through­out the year with humor­ous skits about speed on Jim­my Kim­mel Live, as well as on FX, where Aflac says it will fer­ry con­sumers to the sus­pense­ful end­ings of pop­u­lar movies quick­er, and in major sport­ing events like the Day­tona 500, where the brand will also help speed view­ers to the finales.

Accord­ing to Zuna, each “accel­er­at­ed com­mer­cial break expe­ri­ence” will vary depend­ing on the pro­gram, but view­ers can expect Aflac to take over an entire com­mer­cial break and skip the com­mer­cials with­out the wait “in at least five tele­vi­sion events with­in the next month or two.”

This, Zuna says, “focus­es on Aflac’s com­mit­ment to speed…No mat­ter what con­sumers are watch­ing or inter­est­ed in, we want to offer view­ers more of what they want, with­out the wait.”

Fans of the Aflac Duck on Face­book and Twit­ter will also get a glimpse of the claims process behind the scenes through a series of videos in which Aflac Claims Spe­cial­ists share their per­spec­tives on how pro­cess­ing and pay­ing claims quick­ly pos­i­tive­ly impacts Aflac pol­i­cy­hold­ers, the brand says. The con­tent is intend­ed to “help bring a human touch to Aflac’s claims expe­ri­ence” and will be aggre­gat­ed on Aflac’s One Day Pay Tum­blr page.


What do you think of Aflac’s effort to meet the needs of mod­ern con­sumers?

Lisa Lacy

Written by Lisa Lacy

Lisa is a senior features writer for Inked. She also previously covered digital marketing for Incisive Media. Her background includes editorial positions at Dow Jones, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, AOL, Amazon, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

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