Does Your Auto Insurance Website Disappoint? J.D. Power Says: Probably

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If your auto insurance website is like many others, J.D. Power has some bad news for you: it’s a disappointment. According to their 2016 Insurance Digital Evaluation Study, a little over half of customers surveyed said they “definitely will” return to their insurer’s website to serve their needs in the future. How many customers are we talking about? The study looked at responses from 3,854 shopping evaluations and 3,340 service evaluations measured between January and March of this year.

“Insurer websites are not keeping up with customer expectations,” said John Tews, media relations director at J.D. Power, in a press release.

This is the fifth year that J.D. Power has been conducting this particular study, which examines how well auto insurance websites serve the needs of those who use them. It’s about customer experience, but not just the aesthetics of that experience. The sleekness of one’s website goes only so far. Instead, this study focuses on function: how well does your website actually pull its weight?

There is some good news. Overall satisfaction improved this year by 7 index points. But there’s also a ways to go. Satisfaction related specifically to “servicing activities” rose by only 4 points in 2016. Customers who needed to print or request new ID cards, update their profile or add a driver or a vehicle to their policy just weren’t that impressed.

Meanwhile, failed quotes came in between 4 and 6 percent. If those customers don’t take the initiative to finish their quote through another channel, this amounts to a significant loss in business.

For the moment, these results are a warning, not an emergency. Satisfactions scores aren’t dropping, after all. At least, not yet. According to Valerie Monet at J.D. Power, “While satisfaction hasn’t suffered yet, it likely will if insurers don’t invest in their websites and keep pace with other industries.”

The fact is, websites in other industries are serving their customers’ needs more effectively, and in a digital age, industries are no longer siloed. If a customer has a great experience replacing the shoes they ordered online, they approach their insurer’s site with higher expectations, too.

And frankly, why shouldn’t they? Delivering an excellent customer experience through your website is a very achievable goal.

How to improve your website and deliver a better customer experience

  • Make it easy to understand. J.D. Power found that 23 percent of customers don’t understand (or only partly understand) the policy information they find online.
  • Use video to educate your customers. The number of customers who find it helpful to get policy info from videos is on the rise, from 39 percent last year to 46 percent in 2016.
  • Simplify the steps in your quote process. Twelve percent of customers said the quote process was slower than they expected; only 25 percent said the opposite.
  • Increase the speed of your transactions. Only 26 percent of customers surveyed were wowed by how fast they could pay their bill. In this area, we can help.

Allow us to help you optimize the customer experience you deliver online. Together, we can fly in the face of industry trend, and beat the disappointment curve. To find out more about how mobile engagement can help you enhance your customers’ experience, download our all-new white paper here.