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Online Performance of US Insurers | February 12 2004 |
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Research and consulting firm The Customer Respect Group has released results from its Winter 2004 Online Customer Respect Study, showing the performance of American insurance firms' web sites. All firms ranking among the country's largest 1000 companies are included. The Customer Respect Index (CRI) offers an independent measure of a customer's online experience when interacting with companies via the Internet. It assigns a rating to each company on a scale of one to 10, using qualitative and quantitative in-depth analysis. More than 60 different attributes are considered, and more than 1,000 web sites analysed. The best performing insurance firms improved their ranking versus 2003 (CRI 9.6 for the top company versus 9.1 a year ago), although results as a whole were comparable. Responsiveness and Principles issues are still holding the sector back, however, despite their being flagged as problems in previous surveys. Surveyed firms receive the best overall rating (CRI: 7.9) for Simplicity and the worst (CRI: 5.8) for Principles. While 93% of the firms covered have privacy policies, 35% of them share data without permission from users. Responsiveness varies enormously. Some 13% of firms do not respond to any online enquiries and a further 24% respond to half or less. 63% responded to all inquiries and of these, 88% responded within 48 hours. And while more than half of surveyed firms (55%) have Autoresponder technology, in which emails are automatically sent back to users to confirm the receipt of their inquiry and let them know when they should expect a response, this was the last customers heard from them in 16% of cases. Roger Fairchild, president of The Customer Respect Group, says his researchers are cheered by the results of the top few companies in the survey - 'But frankly we are concerned to note that so many of the nation's largest insurance companies are sharing personal data without permission and that responsiveness to online inquiries remains, at best, spotty. These firms need to strongly consider the connection between respectful Web sites and their ability to compete for new business and retain current customers'. The highest ranked organization within the sector was Cincinnati Financial Corporation at 9.6 (out of 10), while the lowest was Unitrin at 3.0 and the mean score was 6.8. The Winter 2004 ranking for all 70 insurers is as follows:
The report provides detailed suggestions for improvements for each company. The Customer Respect Group is headquartered in Bellevue, WA and its web site is at www.customerrespect.com Simple printable version of this article. Email this article to a friend.
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