Large Insurance Companies Make Customers Wait: Study

Sales automation software provider Velocify reveals customer experience feedback for the industry’s largest insurers in a new study entitled “Insurance Industry Online Buyer Experience”. Results indicate that most need to be more efficient in their responses to online inquiries.

“The primary reason of the study was to determine how insurance carriers are serving the consumer that wants to initiate their shopping online,” says Stuart Ganis, insurance vertical director at Velocify.

Velocify surveyed 25 leading direct, independent and captive insurance companies that specialize in auto, home renters, commercial auto and commercial property insurance. It completed a minimum of five online quote or contact request forms for each insurer then measured various data such as the length of time until first response, and total number of phone or email contact attempts, for 22 days.

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Previous Velocify research concluded that faster responses to quote and contact inquiries result in higher likelihood of conversion. Ideally, insurers should send a response about twenty minutes after the initial request, says George Jeffrey, senior manager of Strategic Intelligence at Velocify. Phone calls should occur almost immediately.

Insurers should contact requesters with six phone calls and five emails over a 22-day period. “We found that to be pretty universal,” says Jeffrey. “You don’t want to call or email too little, and you don’t want to do it too much.”

Results indicated that large insurers are typically late in their responses to consumer inquiries. Customers waited an average of 2.3 days for a phone call after submitting an online quote form. The average email response time was 22 hours after inquiry submission.

Companies that did reach out to their customers were not persistent in their follow-up contacts. Velocify purposely did not answer responses to measure how long it would take for businesses to stop. It found that, on average, each prospect received 1.45 call attempts and 1.56 emails.

Many online requests went ignored. Forty percent of prospects never received a call, 34% did not receive an email and 17% received no response at all. “Even the best insurers were not following what we have found are the best practices,” Jeffrey says.

“You have to leverage technology to automate your processes,” Ganis emphasizes. He notes that the poor customer service practices of larger companies are creating opportunities for smaller ones. “This is a really great opportunity for small- and mid-sized agents to capture that online customer and give them that mom-and-pop-shop type of service.”

Kelly Sheridan is the Staff Editor at Dark Reading, where she focuses on cybersecurity news and analysis. She is a business technology journalist who previously reported for InformationWeek, where she covered Microsoft, and Insurance & Technology, where she covered financial ... View Full Bio