What Consumers Want From Insurers August 5, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.trackback
I recently published a research report called What Consumers Want From Insurers that examined what consumers cared about the most when it came to their insurance providers. In our analysis of survey responses from nearly 5,000 US consumers, we found that consumers most want:
- a good reputation from life insurers
- low prices from auto/home insurers
- high quality coverage from health insurers
We took the analysis one step further and looked at how responses differed across five generations of consumers: Gen Y (18 to 27), Gen X (28 to 41), Younger Boomers (42 to 51), Older Boomers (52 to 62), and Seniors (63 and older). It turns out that Younger Boomers care the most about the actual coverage. Here are some other interesting factoids that we found:
- Life insurers: Gen X wants low prices, Younger Boomers want good coverage, and older consumers want a good reputation.
- Auto/home insurers: Young consumers want low prices, Younger Boomers want good coverage, and older consumers want good service.
- Health insurers: Gen Y and Seniors wants good service, Gen X wants low prices, and Boomers want good coverage.
The bottom line: Insurers need generational-specific strategies.
Interesting post – was the analysis based on open ended (verbatim) responses or closed questions [asking to rank certain criteria]? It looks like the latter to me as the results are somewhat predictable. Using verbatim feedback across the 5000 respondees would require text analytics which could then allow unknown unknowns to be uncovered.
One thing I would have expected to see as a requirement across the board with auto insurance in particular is the time to settle a claim. This is normally very long and my experience is that customers would be delighted if their claims could be settled much faster. Building models of known good claims and known fraudulent claims allows predictive modelling to be applied at FNOL (first notification of loss) such that good claims can be fast tracked and settled (even on the first call) and fraudulent claims can be equally fast tracked but into the fraud department. These models require data mining but could be made far more accurate if text analytics (e.g. of the call centre notes) were deployed too.
Neil: The survey was not open-ended, it was a multiple choice response. I agreee that open-ended responses can provide extremely valuable insights, especially given the capabilities of text analytics vendors.