Video
Insurance customers generally have limited interactions with their providers, but insurers can boost loyalty by increasing customer engagement. Darci Darnell, a partner with Bain's Financial Services practice, outlines how insurers can increase customer loyalty, attract new customers and reduce price sensitivity by focusing on ecosystem services.
Read the Bain Brief: How Insurers Can Reinvent Customer Relationships
Read the transcript below.
DARCI DARNELL: Insurance is a low-interaction, low-engagement category. So perhaps it's not surprising that when you look at the Net Promoter Score for insurers across geographies, there's actually relatively limited differentiation. In the United States, the average NPS score is 27. Most of the insurers don't differentiate more than 10 points off that average score.
In our most recent 2017 survey, 43% of customers didn't interact with their insurance company in the last year. But when we surveyed customers globally—over 170,000, and more than 50,000 in the United States—what they told us is they're looking for insurers to enhance their relationship by offering things in the health domain in terms of monitoring health, helping them understand when weather may impact their homes, or how their teens are driving.
They can bring more of these ecosystem services to bear, and if they don't, the primacy of their relationship with their customer is at risk. If they can, they will increase customer loyalty. They will attract new customers, and, perhaps most importantly in a commoditizing industry, they will reduce price sensitivity.
So the question is, which services, for which insurers, for which consumers? Where do they have the credibility to enhance the relationship? It's their chance to step up to the plate.
Read the Bain Brief: How Insurers Can Reinvent Customer Relationships