Is ‘Customer Experience’ Data The Key To Strong Sales, Retention?

With life insurance product sales disrupted by a variety of threats, insurers are investing heavily resources in "customer experience" analysis.

Customer experience efforts are far enough along that data is emerging. LIMRA teamed up with NEOS for a study of customer experience programs and their impact to date. Todd Silverhart, corporate vice president and director of research quality and performance for LIMRA, will moderate a session today at the Life & Retirement Virtual Conference.

The LIMRA/NEOS study was actually finished late last year, Silverhart said, but the researchers updated it to account for COVID-19 developments. Silverhart will be joined in the session by Andrea Clark, assistant vice president of experience strategy, Western & Southern Financial Group, and Chris Dickinson, senior principal, insurance operations excellence for NEOS.

The survey ended up with 47 companies represented, Silverhart said, and 13 customer experience executives were interviewed.

"Customer experience continues to be a topic where there's a lot of interest," Silverhart said. "I think as an area it continues to be an important part of strategic planning for companies."

In a key takeaway, the study reinforced the idea that life and annuity insurance carriers must shift from a reactive to a proactive approach in order to produce a better customer experience.

Too often, companies are waiting until it's too late to realize their customers have a problem, the study data confirmed:

Nearly one-fifth of respondents are not using any external benchmarking organizations (such as LIMRA, Forrester, or JD Power) to compare their customer experience, tools, or processes to their competitors, the study found.

The Time For Action

The study also recommends that carriers "inform and determine actions based on defined metrics and tools—and use them to their advantage."

The study found that 79% of carriers are investing in tools that capture feedback during key moments. For instance, one of the largest life insurance companies in the world uses a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey—an external tool that measures a customer’s satisfaction after an important part in a process or after a large transaction.

The key is using the data in a positive way, study authors concluded.

"Many carriers are still in the process of understanding how to truly present, apply, and use the information gained from various sources of data," the study reads. "Measuring the business benefits of customer experience helps with internal sponsorship and proving the business case."

In many cases, "the legacy system issue continues to play to plague the industry and when it comes to customer experience, it continues to provide a meaningful obstacle," Silverhart said.

Most insurers are in the very early stages of maturity with customer experience programs, he added. Pushing forward to refined programs can help improve the retention rate and sales/revenue issues.

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Editor John Hilton has covered business and other beats in more than 20 years of daily journalism. John may be reached at john.hilton@innfeedback.com. Follow him on Twitter @INNJohnH.

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