LV= says it is ‘operating at a different level’ as it gains star in 2019’s five-star rating report

Insurer LV= said it has “convinced brokers we’re operating at a different level” as its broker star rating increased from two to three stars in this year’s Five star rating report: personal lines 2019/20 – a research project compiled by Insurance Times.

Michael Lawrence, personal lines director at LV=, explained: “We didn’t recognise the score as being indicative of what we were getting elsewhere and that’s fine, but we didn’t want to close our eyes to it.

“We’ve now convinced some brokers that we’re actually operating at a different level and we’ve made some improvement – that’s a good thing, a good outcome.”

Broker views

The five-star rating report gathers broker feedback across five key service factors. This includes claims, policy documentation, quality of cover, relationship handling and management as well as underwriting.

For 2019, brokers who partner with LV= for personal lines products awarded the insurer an overall three-star rating - an improvement on 2018’s two-star result.

This placed the firm in fifth place, behind Chubb, Covea, Hiscox and AXA – these organisations received between five and four stars each.

Breaking LV=’s results down further, it jumped from two stars to four stars in the relationship handling category. Lawrence attributed this to “strengthening our distribution chains throughout the end of 2018, beginning of 2019”.

He added: “Maybe giving that extra attention, just not spreading our people quite so thinly has helped there. I wasn’t surprised by the four-star score.”

Underwriting improvements

A similar increase occurred in terms of LV=’s underwriting score, again moving from two stars to four stars between 2018 and 2019. Here, Lawrence said: “We’ve empowered [underwriters] and given them greater decision-making authority at point of contact.”

This process included Lawrence and his senior team hitting the road to visit all of LV=’s operating regions in order to obtain “honest, open feedback” from broker partners. Lawrence mentioned Belfast, Glasgow, London, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester as a few of the team’s key pit stops.

“We took as much honest, open feedback as we could gather from our brokers and took that and put it back into some of our processes, practices and policies and tried to improve things for people,” Lawrence explained.

“We already had very strong scores on other surveys. This was clearly one where we thought this is not quite how we recognise it to be, let’s try and understand why. We made wholesale changes to improve.”

Feedback

For Lawrence, gaining feedback is hugely important. He told Insurance Times that organisations can’t always believe their own glory, and that a survey such as the Five star rating report can help highlight the types of brokers that LV= perhaps isn’t reaching with its messaging.

He added that insurers can’t simply dismiss feedback just because they may not believe it to be correct.

“We are very comfortable taking feedback from our brokers and saying what is within there that we can take some learnings from and maybe need to focus on,” Lawrence said.

“We’re quite happy to take feedback from a number of areas and we don’t dismiss them; we always take them and see what we can drill down in them – that’s where the survey’s been useful for us.”

Despite feeling as if LV=’s overall score didn’t quite hit the expected mark, Lawrence added: “We were very happy to have an increase of a star.” 

As for striving for more stars in next year’s report, Lawrence said LV= would continue to focus on delivering the best outcomes for brokers in terms of value and quality.