That's why Aflac developed and deployed a handful of offerings that can access that information remotely via a variety of mobile devices including notebook computers, PDAs and smartphones like BlackBerrys and Palm Treos. And the company's had so much success with the initial offerings that it's already working on expanding the portfolio.

"Our overall goal is really to empower the field force, to make them more successful," Shields says. That's not only to help customers; he also sees these applications as part of a recruiting strategy.

"We have three priorities for our mobile apps," Shields adds. "We want to make our agents more effective, more efficient, and more attractive. And I don't mean give them a haircut and a shave. I mean we want to make our jobs the most attractive to [other] agents because we help them more than any other insurance company."

AflacAnywhere and Mobile.Aflac: Pushing Notifications and Data to Agents

AflacAnywhere is a subscription-based Web portal that lets agents sign up for alerts and notifications like fax submission and receipt status, payroll account changes, policy modifications, and pending business alerts that may require action on their part, according to Shields.

The Aflac Duck

Such alerts can be delivered to their notebook PCs or smartphones via e-mail, portal notification, automated voice alerts or SMS text messages. And agents can customize the alerts to streamline communications in the ways that best suit them. About 4,000 Aflac field agents currently use AflacAnywhere, which was first launched last year, Shields says. On average, Aflac agents use five or the dozen available notifications.

And in January, the company announced the launch of a smartphone-specific application that part of its Mobile.Aflac initiative. The application, which was developed in-house by the company's software research center in Atlanta, provides information on things like policy servicing questions, the status of claims payment, and information on customers' existing or past policies.

To gather specs for the applications Shields sent a number of his IT staffers out to the field to work with agents. The team also analyzed call center and agent support line reports to determine what issues were troubling them most often.