Levels of trust in insurance companies are at a low point, and the industry has suffered a greater reduction in trust levels than any other sector during the pandemic. While others embraced change and pivoted, insurance struggled to adapt.
Long contact centre queues, frustrating digital and chatbot experiences, and bad publicity about disappointed claimants have contributed to undermining customer confidence.
And with the market hardening and premiums set to rise, things are about to get even more challenging.
But rebuilding trust isn’t an impossible task. It can — and it will — be done. Starting with clear, honest and personal communication, insurers must keep their customers informed — and then deliver on their promises.
We outline how insurers can rebuild trust with better communication, safeguarding, and becoming trusted advisors.
Better communications lead to higher trust
The Insurance Innovators’ 2021 survey was undertaken in partnership with Smart Communications and Salesforce. Eighty-four percent of its respondents believe that optimising customer communications and touchpoints would have a significant effect in ensuring customers more readily trust their insurers.
And 90% of respondents believe that customers become more distrustful of insurers when they find descriptions of product features and add-on products confusing at the point of sale.
Therefore, rebuilding trust must start with greater clarity and better guidance at the points of quote, sale, and renewal. Customers cannot trust insurers if they don’t understand what they are buying.
To rebuild trust, messaging needs to be clear — and it also needs to increase in frequency.
It’s not just confusing communication that damages trust; a lack of it is also harmful.
Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents agree that a lack of proactive, personalised contact with customers (except at renewal and during the claims process) contributes to the low levels of trust in insurance. An even larger number (94%) worry that there is a disconnect between insurance organisations’ caring marketing messages and how a lack of communication makes customers feel.
The solution isn’t to bombard customers — messages that are not personalised and do not add value are a potential source of irritation. However, insurers need to make more valuable connections with customers beyond the critical interaction points to rebuild trust.
Safeguarding to build trust
The poor digital experience was one of the reasons why insurance suffered a loss of trust when the pandemic hit.
Without a seamless digital experience, trust will continue to suffer. COVID-19 has been a catalyst for customer interactions taking place through automated and digital channels. Eighty percent of respondents believe unsatisfactory and frustrating digital experiences have contributed to the loss of trust. To address this, insurers need to safeguard their online experiences.
Our research identified three types of safeguarding that would protect trust during digital experiences:
1. Personalisation
Personalising messages helps improve communication and reduce frustration.
Providing personalised and empathetic messaging to convey an understanding of the customer’s needs and concerns can minimise the loss of trust, as can orchestrating the digital experience to send customers to the most appropriate channel for their needs.
Ninety-eight percent said optimising personalised customer contact across all digital interactions would be important in increasing people’s trust in their insurers.
2. Seamless omnichannel experience
Providing a seamless and consistent experience across all channels is a key part of restoring trust.
Ninety-five percent of our respondents agree that frictionless experiences are paramount to engendering trust and, conversely, poor digital experiences can significantly dent a customer’s confidence in an insurer’s reliability.
3. Easy and fulfilling self-service automation
Insurers can build trust by improving their current self-service offerings in various ways, including:
Providing faster and a broader range of self-service automation
Offering comprehensive pre-population of forms
Introducing full self-service automation through advanced virtual agents that use straight through processing to implement processes end to end
Providing proactive guidance where needed, utilising chatbots or AI
Those surveyed had so much faith that optimisation of digital experience can boost trust that eight out of ten said a super end-to-end digital experience has the potential to be just as effective in building trust as human contact.
The road to insurers becoming trusted advisors will not be an easy one
We are moving towards a new insurer-customer relationship model: the insurer as a trusted advisor. But this change will take time.
Insurers have the opportunity to engage customers with more frequent communication. Enabled by advanced analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT), the insurance proposition is expected to evolve away from pure risk mitigation towards risk prevention based, in part, on regular advice.
To be seen as trusted advisors, insurers will need to translate their advice into tangible reductions in risk in customers’ lives. Ninety-six percent of respondents believe that optimising personalised customer contact will be important for insurers’ successful transition to a risk prevention proposition and the role of a trusted advisor.
In the long term, 95% of our respondents believe that individually personalised, real-time and frictionless communication will become a cornerstone of the insurance proposition and the insurer-customer relationship. To rebuild trust, insurers will move from their distant approach of engaging only at sales, renewal, and claims. Instead, they will win trust regularly with personalised and effective risk mitigation advice and seamless digital experiences.
This is a major change that can’t happen overnight. It’s a long term goal. And that’s why insurers need to start making changes today.
Want to find out more about how insurers can become trusted advisors in a digital-first world? Explore the Insurance Innovators’ 2021 survey infographic and learn how improving customer understanding at the point of sale, managing expectations during the claims process, and raising the quality and quantity of interactions will boost trust.
How can trust in insurance best be rebuilt?
Learn how trust in Insurance can be rebuilt by becoming trusted advisors in the digital-first world.
