How can we better engage consumers – Insurer session: JANUARY forum recap

“I lead a team of people focussed on change, activity and future innovation. And a large percentage of our time is allocated to the end-to-end advisor experience through Aviva online system. So when considering change that experience, we draw on feedback to inform the intervention required. It is gathered by their own insights team, sometimes externally commissioned research advisers, journey feedback, user analytics, data feedback from advisor firms and of course industry forums like today.

“Flexibility in our communications approach has increased. Most of our documents have defaulted to an electronic first view, though the ability to download an email to customers remains and a policy can still be requested for issuers customers. Although interestingly, only 25% of advisors use that function now.”

“Around 30,000 calls are received each month from our 3.1 million Aviva customers… Change of address and policy cancellation combined make up 45% of all contacts from customers with a further 25% of demands. Covering changing bank details. Questions relating to trusts, power of attorney, assignments, and general cover inquiries. It’s an ongoing programme of digitisation in place to provide an online self-service capability for customers covering basic policy updates, inquiries and claims. So change of address, policy cancellation, change of name and the ability to initiate most types of claims are available through the My Veeva Web and App service… The more information and online service interactions we make available, the more frequently we have seen repeat visits from customers”

“The headlines of this research were that almost half of life and critical illness customers didn’t know their policy was only for a fixed period. So 23% thought it was for the whole of their life. 22% thought it was directly linked to their mortgage. And 11% thought it had cash in value.”

“Two in five Income protection customers didn’t correctly understand the deferred period. So one in five thought it was the time between being diagnosed with an illness and being off work or the time between making a claim and it is paid and the remainder just didn’t know. So although customer understanding of protection policies is by no means at a crisis point, it’s clear there is more we can do to increase regular communications with customers and improve their understanding of how their policy functions… customer duty principles will offer further opportunities for insurers to explore customers understanding of their products and how communications can help clarify and simplify things. 

“I’m a big advocate of the fact that advisors have the necessary expertise and experience to add value to those communications. And so my approach, first and foremost, would be to ensure that those communications are routed by the advisor. So they have the opportunity to assess the communication, and discuss that with the customer before the customer receiving that particular communication. And if the advisor opportunity find, the customer will get the communication anyway.”

“What we’ve seen very consistently for the last two waves, so throughout 2022, is that levels of satisfaction have grown and have hit an all-time peak. So people are coming to providers, to brokers, to everybody in our sector with very high expectations of what customer service will be. And that isn’t just dictated by what we’re doing. It’s everything that they are experiencing as a consumer. And interestingly, I know in the chat there’s been quite a lot of debate about the trade of quality cost.” 

“Our own research last year showed that people on average are just 19 days from the breadline and financial resilience shrunk 21% since the beginning of the pandemic. So we know that financial resilience isn’t there. But arguably this is a real opportunity for us as a protection industry.”  

“Clearly there is a demand for digital and the increasing demand of younger generations is going to continue that trend. But we are amiss as an industry if we don’t really recognise and value the importance that advisors have in those face-to-face relationships, the importance that our contact centres play in helping provide people with that reassurance, particularly because interestingly what we’ve seen is there is digital exclusion. ” 

“So particularly in light of consumer duty, I think it’s the balance in getting that mix so people can access through the channels that are going to really work well for those.”

“What we’re effectively trying to do is encourage clients to understand their health and then decide for themselves whether they want to make sort of healthy lifestyle choices, whether that means improving their level of exercise, having a more balanced diet, quitting smoking, whatever it might be. And there’s no sort of compulsion, as you probably know… We reward them through some kind of behavioural economics that we’ve used…if you want something, somebody to do something that’s going to have a long-term impact on their life, you need to encourage and reward them. “

“Over the period since we started, we’ve now got over 40 million life years of data that we’re collecting and utilising to sort of link our client behaviour with mortality and morbidity. “

“We produce a magazine which is a hardcopy magazine. We do that two times a year. It’s very much a lifestyle content, not heavy sale or anything like that around vitality other than health and wellbeing articles.”

“23% on average of their premium is received back. So that’s for people who are either not engaged or very little engaged right up to our platinum members who get about 62% of their premiums back on average. So just through using the benefits, it’s regular use using that. Going back to the point I made earlier on, we’re trying to encourage clients to use that policy regularly, interact with it and create contact points for you. “

“Our behavioural and clinical data shows that members are 40% more likely to make positive lifestyle choices over a year, 95% improvement in not smoking, 68% improvement around mental health, etc. You can see for yourself these are positive changes that are resonating. And then we also see reducing the health care costs. “

“The problem that you’ve got is there’s the policies are so complex now and it’s great, all the additional rider benefits and stuff like that that insurers are putting in, but they’re so complex. And other than that, as far as the clients are aware, they purchased life cover, they purchased income protection or they’ve purchased critical illness cover or they’ve purchased home insurance, that’s what they’ve done. And we’re probably all guilty of it, that we all pay a premium for it. But do we actually know the raw specifics of it? Because all that the client knows at the point of a claim is, oh, am I covered or am I not covered? Then they have a look and see what it’s covered for. Then it’s very, very hard with all the additional stuff to keep putting at it because it’s not something that people are picking up and putting down on a regular basis. ” 

“People just don’t read stuff. And I think you’ve got to not give too much credit to people for just reading stuff because I know, and you must know in your heart of hearts, people don’t read. And because of that, that’s where everything gets lost in communication, which is where things need to be simplified. And some of the stuff that you do for us is marketing. Where you’ve got content on one sheet is perfect for a client, but I know probably from a regulatory point of view you can’t do that because you’ve got to explain it in greater detail. “

“I just wonder if if it’s time to kind of almost change the engagement from email and actually make something more important. Because I hate wanting to use the post because it’s obviously all over the place at the moment. But if I’m getting a letter now because it’s so rare to actually get a letter because everybody reverts to send things to email, I’m actually going back to actually are someone’s actually written to me, I’ll read this what’s it about because I’m not getting a ton of ton of rubbish in my post box now so it becomes almost okay, what is that? So I just wonder whether it’s time to kind of reverse that and post rather than putting stuff in an email that people are very, very easily delete able and it just sits amongst all the other spam that comes through from everybody else that, that, you know, sort of joins the same inbox now.”