Voice of the Customer: The Key to Shaping Insurance Insights

This infrequency means collecting consistent and timely feedback can be a challenge, creating gaps in understanding the customer experience. This can lead to insurers relying on outdated or irrelevant feedback, which in turn makes it much harder to make informed decisions.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Varied Customer Acquisition Models

The insurance sector contains multitudes: encompassing a wide range of business models, from direct-to-consumer sales to broker-led acquisitions. Each model presents its own unique challenges in gathering customer feedback.

Direct-to-consumer models may use digital channels for feedback, while broker-led models rely on intermediaries who might not consistently capture or convey customer sentiments. This variety means each acquisition model needs its own tailored approach to gather comprehensive and accurate insurance insights.

Lots of Plans: Complexity of Insurance Products

This complexity also extends to the huge range of insurance products, spanning all of human life: from health to homes to holidays and more. Each category caters to different, distinct customer needs and experiences, and that means they require specialized feedback strategies.

Chatting across Generations: Varied Demographics

It’s not just the products: the demographics of customers varies by product too, and that means engagement also needs to be carefully tailored. Take life insurance as an example. With insurance products that skew younger, digital channels like email and SMS are popular for surveys. Whereas with life insurance—the percentage of life insurance ownership increases with age—an SMS approach would be deemed inappropriate, because of both the sensitive subject matter and the relatively primitive communication method (telephone calls are much more common in this category).

A Fresh Perspective: Why VOC Delivers Insurance Insights

1. Go beyond touchpoints to analyze the customer journey

Traditional feedback methods often focus on individual touch points, rather than the entire customer journey. This isn’t necessarily the best use of investment dollars. Instead, analyzing the entire journey provides a more holistic view of the customer experience and can identify pain points and opportunities across the journey.

So, instead of asking 20 questions about what happened in a contact center interaction, it can be better to zoom out and look at the claims journey from start to finish. Discover customers’ impressions of the end-to-end journey and how channels worked together (or didn’t).

By mapping the customer journey from the earliest stages of policy research and purchase through to claims and renewals, insurers can uncover useful insights that identify isolated issues, as well as systemic challenges that might impact overall customer satisfaction.

2. Understand your revenue-driving audiences

Depending on the journeys or the touch points that companies want to measure, it’s really important to understand who is the primary audience that is being asked for feedback.

Not all customers are created equal—some contribute more to an insurer’s revenue. That means identifying and understanding the segments that drive the most value is crucial.

A VOC strategy should tailor the insurers’ feedback mechanisms to capture insights from these high-value segments. This targeted approach helps align products and services with the preferences of the most profitable customer groups and enhances loyalty and retention.

3. Create product-specific strategies

The wealth of different insurance products means they need their own feedback strategies. For example, feedback for health insurance might focus on claims processing time given the urgency of the subject, while a longer-term purchase like life insurance feedback could center around value-led policy features and customer service quality.