We are excited to announce the release of our 2013 Consumer Recommendation & Loyalty Studies for the Property and Motor Insurance sectors.

There are many insightful findings across both studies and we wanted to release a sneak peak of the results.

The objective of the study was to understand how engaged Australian customers are to their property and motor insurance providers. All respondents were existing customers of their respective property and motor insurers. 2640 motor insurance customers and 2422 property insurance customers participated.

The key measure for our study was the Net Promoter Score®. A company’s Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is based on customers’ likelihood to recommend the company on a zero-to-ten point scale. NPS is calculated as the percentage of customers who are Promoters, who score the company with a 9 or 10, minus the percentage of those who are Detractors, rating the company with a score of 6 or lower.

Everyone knows the importance of word of mouth, but typically people consider property and motor insurance to be low-involvement, ‘grudge’ purchases which aren’t conversation-worthy. Our recent studies show that this is far from the truth.

According to our study, a substantial 22 per cent of respondents indicated that they choose their property insurance provider primarily because of word of mouth (WOM). Motor insurance customers show a similar trend with 19 per cent of participants indicating that they choose their current motor insurance provider because of what others had to say about them.

To further solidify the importance of WOM we found that for every one negative comment an individual hears about a particular brand they insist that they would need to hear four to five positive comments on average before they would reconsider the brand in question.

Because WOM is so important it is even more imperative that Australian motor and property insurers pick up their game as they are lagging behind their international counterparts when it comes to providing experiences worthy of recommendation. The category average for both motor and property insurers in the US was +41 per cent. This is in stark contrast to the Australian motor insurance category average of -8 per cent and the Australian property insurance category average of -13 per cent.

Nonetheless, there were some Australian motor and property insurers who stood out from the pack. The 2013 Australian motor insurance loyalty leader was relatively new entrant Youi, with a NPS of 14 per cent. The property insurance loyalty leader for the fourth year running was Apia, with a NPS of 13 per cent. Both these organisations stand out from the crowd by making it crystal clear which customers they service – Apia focuses on the over 50’s segment while Youi targets customers who want tailored insurance so they only pay for what they use.

These exciting insights are just the tip of the iceberg. Australian motor and property insurance customers have a lot to say. To get in on the conversation or to find out more about the 2013 Consumer Recommendation and Loyalty Studies click here for property insurance or click here for motor insurance.

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