As insurance companies strive to provide a positive customer experience and nurture brand loyalty, surveys like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) have become a standard tool for measuring customer satisfaction. But for many insurers, their limited use of NPS along the customer journey often results in an incomplete and inaccurate assessment. In this blog, we’ll explore how insurers can improve their NPS collection and opt-in processing to improve the customer experience and ensure long-term retention.
The Value of NPS
To keep their brand promises and build trust, insurers need to understand customer sentiment and respectfully handle outreach consent. NPS surveys can provide insurers with an accurate understanding of their customer relationships. By deploying surveys at various touchpoints throughout the customer journey, insurers can collect a more holistic picture of customer satisfaction to identify areas where they need to improve their services and better manage expectations.
Eliminating Service Gaps
The problem with NPS collection is that it is not offered at most points along the customer journey. Insurers need to deploy surveys after every significant interaction, such as after the customer requests a quote, after follow-up, throughout the claims journey, after new product releases, and other critical touchpoints. Gathering feedback at every delivery interaction and integrating data across channels like phone, chat, text, and email gives insurers an accurate view of how customers feel about their brand. It also helps them identify opportunities to better educate customers so their expectations are realistic.
The Value of NPS Data-Based Outreach
Insurers can use the data generated by NPS surveys to assess customers and focus their outreach on policyholders who are likely to create the most value over the lifetime of their relationship. The right data, when properly analyzed and integrated, can help insurers keep their best customers happy. Insurers that eliminate NPS gaps can also gain insight into customer coverage perceptions and identify gaps between these perceptions and policy reality.
Respecting Customer Opt-Ins
Insurers receive secondary input on brand perceptions from other choices customers make, such as opting in to receive text messages and emails. When a customer reaches out to their insurer via a call center or chatbot, insurers can solicit feedback by giving customers the option to complete an NPS survey when the interaction ends. However, insurers need to handle opt-in preferences respectfully and have the infrastructure to handle these interactions dynamically. Insurers also need to ask for express consent to communicate via text or call and have a system that can pull customer records across channels. Honoring customers’ preferences is a great way to build trust and communicate that their choices are respected.
Managing Expectations: A Two-Way Street
Customers want to feel that they are in control and that their choices are honored. Therefore, it is important to obtain consent before texting or calling them. Customers can be fickle and will provide opt-ins and opt-outs depending on their needs at the time. However, as insurers increasingly rely on automation for efficiency, access to voluntarily shared data and communication tools requires customer trust and permissions. Managing expectations is a two-way street, and insurers can outline their terms of service at the beginning of the relationship, so that everyone is fully aware and informed.
The Final Word
Throughout the customer journey, insurers need to gather feedback at multiple touchpoints, use NPS data to better assess customer satisfaction, and build the infrastructure to process this data to drive valuable insights. By honoring customers’ outreach choices, insurers can reinforce the message that they respect customers’ preferences and establish greater trust. There’s no better time for insurance companies to expand their use of NPS data to capture customer preference information at every step of their journey. By doing so, they can develop a complete picture of customer tastes to cultivate a relationship of long-term satisfaction, trust, and mutual respect.
View original source here