Insurance Times Awards 2023: NFU Mutual looks to alleviate the burden of bereavement on customers

What made you decide to enter the Customer Champion of the Year – Insurer category?

Following feedback from customers and customer-facing teams in 2022, we identified that we had an opportunity to improve our approach to bereavement; how we process bereavement notifications, how we interact with customers and their relatives and how we help them to manage their policies during this most difficult of times.

As a Mutual, and with our business model being designed around local personal service, giving a grieving customer tasks to do felt unreasonable and that we could do more to take the effort away from them and do more to be the supportive business we strive to be.

What do you think makes your entry stand out and why should you win the award?

We asked ourselves if what we do was good enough. We wanted to make a complex matter easier for someone at a difficult time in their lives, when insurance is one of many items of “admin” they must deal with.

We felt it was the right thing to do for our customers and have received compliments about having an easy process delivered with compassion and empathy.

What would winning this award mean to you and your firm?

To me, I feel this is gratification for the project team as a whole.

We all feel very proud of our achievements and the feedback internally and from our customers has made my year. We all take a lot of pride in helping people in a vulnerable position, but this is usually on an individual basis.

To have the chance to deliver a project that would improve our service for so many people for years to come is an immense achievement to us all and a much better outcome for many of our customers.