How Insurance Customer Experience Can Fuel Growth

Many businesses focus on business growth as a primary goal. It makes sense. If you want to increase your revenue, you need to grow. Furthermore, a company that is able to achieve significant growth must be doing something right.

What constitutes an impressive growth rate will depend on many factors, but Indeed¹ offers a good rule of thumb: a good growth rate is one that surpasses the gross domestic product (GPD) growth of the country. Using this measure, if the current economic growth of a country is 4%, a business that is growing faster than 4% could be considered to be doing well.

This isn’t the only way to benchmark business growth. For example, it can also be helpful to look at other businesses in the same industry and of the same size to compare growth rates. If your top competitor is growing at a faster rate than you can achieve, it could be cause for concern. More specifically, it could indicate a problem with your customer experience.

The Link Between Customer Experience and Sustainable Growth

Regardless of the exact figures and benchmarks used, most companies are focused on growth. This generally involves acquiring new customers, although retaining current customers can be just as important, if not more. Most everyone in business has heard the assertion that it costs more to acquire new customers than to retain current customers.

Existing customers are also a major source of word-of-mouth advertising. HubSpot² reports that consumers discuss specific brands in casual conversation 90 times per week, and 90% of people believe brand recommendations from their friends. Your customers are talking about your brand, and their friends are listening. This makes word-of-mouth advertising an incredibly powerful marketing tool for companies trying to achieve growth. It should go without saying, but growth needs to be sustainable for it to be meaningful. And for that to happen, the customer experience needs to match the brand promise.

Using the Net Promoter Score® to Predict Growth

Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a customer experience metric used to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty. First developed by Bain and Company in 2003, it’s based on a simple question: How likely is it that you would recommend the brand in question to a friend or colleague? Using the results, it’s possible to classify customers as promoters who will fuel growth, detractors who may undermine growth, and passives who may leave your brand for your competitors.

According to Bain & Company³, the organization behind the Net Promoter Score, research has found a strong link between a brand’s score and its organic growth. In fact, Net Promoter Scores can explain approximately 20% to 60% of the variation in organic growth among competitors.

If your competitors are growing faster than you, it’s probably (at least in part) because your existing customers aren’t likely to recommend your brand. If you want to accelerate growth, you need to incentivize existing customers to recommend your brand, and that means improving the customer experience. The Net Promoter Score is a simple, effective way of measuring whether or not you’re succeeding in this respect.

Getting your scores is only the first step, however. Once you have your survey results, you need to determine how to use the information to improve your products and services so you can fuel growth. There are different ways to go about this. Here are a few examples:

• Use benchmarks to compare yourself to your competitors.
• Compare products and services within your own company. For example, insurers can use surveys for different lines of business to determine which ones are producing high levels of policyholder satisfaction and which ones aren’t.
• Integrate CSAT scores and customer sentiment analysis for a more holistic view, and ensure the results feed into specific improvement initiatives to drive improvement.

Growing with One Inc

One Inc is here to help you on your digital journey. Our Client Success Team actively partners with clients to optimize their payment transformation by providing education, digital adoption best practices, digital payment data and metrics, and best-in-class benchmarking. With One Inc at your side, continually adding value, sustainable business growth is achievable.

Contact us to learn more.

Sources

1. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-is-a-good-growth-rate-for-a-company
2. https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30239/71-More-Likely-to-Purchase-Based-on-Social-Media-Referrals-Infographic.aspx
3. https://www.netpromotersystem.com/about/how-net-promoter-score-relates-to-growth/