When it comes to auto and residential policyholders, insurance is a commodity that many consumers purchase and then forget about. According to Nielsen’s recent Insurance Sentiments Report, more than one in four policyholders surveyed have been covered by the same primary policy for 15 years or more for each type of policy.
However, as more options are made available to consumers, they gain a buyer’s advantage. This becomes more obvious when you look at shifts in insurance retention rates and retention rates among younger consumers. Respondents to the Nielsen survey who were 39 years or younger, were more likely to have switched insurers in the past three years and were the least likely to report being satisfied with their insurers.
The Nielsen report suggests that younger generations are harder to please than their parents and grandparents. However, it’s important to bear in mind that younger generations have very different expectations, and those expectations were put in place by the generations that preceded them.
The Baby Boomers and GenXers who built the internet and many of its consumer tools have created an environment that favors consumers. Millennials have grown up in this atmosphere, and they naturally expect to insurance agencies to provide the same ease of service as their favorite brands.
They expect to be able to conduct pricing research online without having to call and speak to a representative. They expect a quick turnaround on questions and complaints. They expect packages tailored to their needs rather than a one-size-fits-all policy.
While it might seem like these expectations make Millennials choosy, in fact, consumers have been complaining to the insurance industry about these same issues for decades. A slow response time to these demands may be the reason that the industry has been steadily dropping in terms of trustworthiness for years.
Let’s get the most obvious issue out of the way first. Times are tough all around, and that makes high premiums a problem for many consumers. However, your policyholders will happily pay a reasonable price if they believe they’re getting value in return, which comes to the more notable reasons they switch: features and customer service.
Modern consumers want what they want, and they’ve grown accustomed to getting it. Insurance agencies that make it easier for consumers to customize their policies to meet their needs will gain an advantage.
Client services has been a consistently recurring complaint among insurance policyholders for years. That’s a shame considering it’s the easiest problem to solve in the modern era. New technology makes it possible for insurance agencies to provide rapid resolutions to client queries and to present a more personable face to consumers in general.
A robust customer service platform can help address the first two complaints as well. Many younger consumers don’t know as much as they’d like to about insurance, which makes measuring one policy against another a challenge. Through your agency’s blog, webinars, and other inbound marketing resources, you can help guide young consumers towards a better understanding of what makes insurance valuable and how to ask for what they need.