According to analyst firms, consulting companies and various other research, customer experience is the primary priority for insurance companies. But is customer experience overrated?
Let’s start by considering the primary interactions between an insurance company and its customers: new business, billing, renewals and claims. Ask any insurance executive, especially property & casualty, and they will tell you the most important customer experience is the claims process. Yet a recent survey by Accenture found that more than 40% of customers who submit claims are likely to switch insurers within the following year, regardless of satisfaction.
If the claims satisfaction does not positively influence retention rates, we should ask if the customer experience is just hype?
In an article, “Does Improving the Customer Experience Matter?”, Mark Breading from Strategy Meets Action, writes that to answer this question insurance companies must consider three questions:
- Who is the customer?
- What influences their experience?
- Why does it all matter?
It’s the third question I want to focus on. In a blog I wrote earlier this year, I discussed that the primary objective of an Insurance CEO is to grow the business. For most insurance companies, this means increasing market share. To attract new customers and retain existing policyholders, insurance companies need to differentiate themselves from their competitors and the customer experience is vital to achieving this objective.
To learn more download the white paper: “Six Steps to an Unmatched Customer Experience.”
As the great philosopher, Homer Simpson, once said “People can come up with statistics to prove anything”. So while the report from Accenture may be true, insurance companies know that the customer experience does indeed matter.
I’m Stuart Rose, Global Insurance Marketing Director at SAS. For further discussions, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
