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5 July 2021

WEBINAR: Customer Experience in the Age of Fair Value

When we started our research into customer experience, we realised the results would be more useful if we could facilitate a wider conversation. A discussion that could generate some practical solutions to help providers improve customer satisfaction levels.

We hope that our webinar, Customer Experience in the Age of Fair Value, delivers exactly that. You can watch the full recording below.

Featuring Consumer Intelligence’s Ian Hughes, Fairer Finance’s James Daley, and Covéa’s Vicki Heslop, the discussion explored what a good customer experience looks like, how insurers can improve their service, and why it matters. Both to businesses and their policyholders.

We also wanted to generate comparable data that allows providers to benchmark performance against their peers, and help them understand what is driving the value inherent to their policies.

To this end, our first research report has ranked 25 leading insurers and brokers across four key metrics. Download a free abridged version of the report here.

The Customer Expectation Gap

Now, back to the webinar.

One of the most important points to come out of the conversation surrounded the idea of the customer expectation gap and the lack of understanding (and trust) from consumers in the insurance world.

Trust has been a big issue for the insurance industry for a number of years, and it was the lowest rated metric by Fairer Finance across the three criteria used in our analysis – trust, happiness and transparency.

The recent impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on travel insurance and business interruption policies has only exacerbated this problem.

To help rebuild trust in the industry, Daley believes that providers must do much more during the onboarding process in order to better educate policyholders during the purchase journey.

While he understands there is a balance to be had between providing enough information to aid understanding and delivering so much that the customer abandons the purchase, Daley believes that insurers could still do a lot more.

One idea put forward by Daley is for insurers to deliver informational videos while payments are being processed so that it doesn’t disrupt the journey, but demonstrates how insurers are doing all they can to improve understanding of their policies.

Covéa’s Heslop, meanwhile, said that there needs to be a greater desire from consumers to understand their policies better, but did concede that providers could still be doing more.

She added that her team have already worked to increase the transparency of their policies (something that our research shows is an issue across the wider UKGI market) by inviting young family members of Covéa’s staff to review policy wordings.

This ‘Jargon Busting with Juniors’ has already helped reduce the average reading age of Covéa’s policies. The insurer is also looking into how they can bring cartoons into their policy documents to give policyholders another channel for understanding policy details.

The Trust Dividend

Meanwhile, Hughes said that the industry as a whole could do a lot more to remove jargon from user journeys, and urged providers to work together to deliver consistency in the definition of different industry terms.

This would go some way to helping ease customer confusion, and Hughes said that research from Consumer Intelligence has shown the importance of the ‘trust dividend’ not only on customer loyalty, but also on overall financial performance.

Hughes describes this trust dividend as the carrot to the FCA’s stick, and highlighted points of communication between customer and insurer, such as offering quotes, delivering on mid-term adjustments or policies coming up for renewal, as the key areas where insurance can build on this trust dividend and demonstrate real value.

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