Insurers have opportunity to boost customer loyalty says CII

The biggest area of opportunity for insurers to improve their performance relates to customer loyalty, as research by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) identified this as a prime driver when individuals are choosing a provider.

Other improvement opportunities highlighted by the CII’s Public Trust Index includes price, protection, confidence and relationships.

The index surveyed 1,000 consumers about their experience of motor, buildings and travel insurance as well as polled 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses about motor, buildings and employers’ liability policies in October 2019.

Insurance satisfaction

The Public Trust Index found that 17.17% of respondents are extremely satisfied with their insurance coverage, 48.20% are satisfied and 17.66% are slightly satisfied. Furthermore, more than a third of overall respondents (37.19%) rate insurance as extremely important.

Of those that participated in the survey, 44.27% had taken out travel insurance, 80.26% had buildings or contents cover and 76.77% had purchased a motor policy.

In the last 12 months, 84.45% of policyholders had made a claim – the majority of these were motor claims (52.98%), followed by buildings or content policy claims (42.38%) and travel claims (31.13%).

More than half (59.71%) of respondents buy insurance because they view it as a responsible thing to do, while a third (33%) opt to purchase insurance because the risk of something going wrong is too great.

Other prominent reasons for having insurance include being able to put right any damage policyholders cause accidentally to other people or their property (32.60%) and to make sure that policyholders’ lives wouldn’t change if something went wrong (31.51%).

Around 45% agree that insurance requires regulation, and 37.29% strongly believe this is true.

Public trust

Sian Fisher, chief executive at the CII, said: “Insurers are doing many things well and command a strong level of overall customer satisfaction.

“However, despite the efforts of regulators, trade associations and many individual insurance companies, including the ABI and Biba’s Guiding Principles and Action Points for General Insurance Pricing industry led initiative, more work needs to be done in the area of renewal pricing. Having an ongoing measure of how insurers are performing against customer expectations allows our members to build up a detailed picture of how they can increase public trust.

“Through our trust tool, which is a database of 50 statements about the things that consumers have told us are important features of insurance, they are telling us the factors that would increase their trust in the renewal process, from offering the same price to new and existing customers, to matching renewal deals from other providers and making no-claims bonuses easier to understand.

“Although the issues around renewal pricing have been with us for a long time, the solutions do exist – we need to take heed of what the public are telling us.”