Covéa’s Carol Geldard on how to be a five star insurer

What makes for a good service for brokers in the personal lines market? 

In a nutshell, we focus on nurturing strong relationships with intermediary partners who share our values and work closely together for the benefit of our mutual customers. This involves having an open management style and giving brokers access to our key decision makers, including underwriting and claims personnel at all levels in our business.

We also hold regular networking events where we look ahead and sideways to review and discuss hot topics and opportunities. These are ideal forums for sharing views, learning from each other and having honest conversations.

For high net worth brokers, we run regular training and showcase events and offer high quality training through our Broker Training Academy, helping to equip their employees with technical skills and product knowledge that add value for customers.

We look ahead at emerging customer needs to ensure our product offering meets the evolving risk landscape. For example, we’ve added a cyber helpline to our standard home insurance and offer cyber cover with high net worth products.

Find out what brokers made of Covéa’s Five Star service

Covéa improved its claims rating compared to the 2018 report. What have you done to improve in this area?

We try to make it easy for customers to make a genuine claim and to pay it fast. We’ve initiated an investment programme to drive service and efficiency improvements and we’ve introduced an agile approach to help us roll out new technologies that will bring benefits to our customers faster.

In 2019 we gained Institute of Customer Service accreditation at the highest level across all our personal lines teams and our commercial and high net worth claims teams. This independent audit of our service incorporates an ongoing feedback cycle that ensures we never rest on our laurels and are continuously improving.

Covéa ranked first for the accuracy and transparency of its policy documentation. What makes for good policy documents, and how have you ensured such a good performance in this area? 

Good question. We apply behavioural economics, use plain English, make use of icons and graphics and test our documents for understanding and readability using child focus groups. We also constantly listen to and act on broker, customer and employee feedback.

What does the future hold for brokers working with Covea? What are you doing to ensure a strong performance when it comes to next year’s report?

Consistency, which means more of the ‘5* same’(!) plus we’ll be talking more about customer service gains from our technology investment and [agile] transformation plans.

Find out more about the Insurance Times Personal Lines Five Star report