4 in 5 Americans would pick up the phone if they ran into difficulties online w/insurance companies
June 7, 2010 at 7:06 pm OpTier 1 comment
During the ACORD Loma Insurance Systems Forum last month, we heard a lot of talk about customer efficiency and improving customer experience. Today, we announced the results of a survey conducted for OpTier by Ipsos Public Affairs that also points to the need for insurers to provide a better online experience for customers.
Some of the most interesting results of the survey include:
- Four out of five Americans (83 percent) are likely to resolve any issues they experience in purchasing or processing a claim online by reaching for the phone.
- Young people aged 18-34 are 10 percentage points more likely than older consumers to have already purchased or plan to purchase or research health insurance online (25 percent vs. 15 percent, respectively).
We all know that online customers looking to resolve claims and other issues via phone are an expensive proposition for insurance companies. BTM is one way for insurance companies to be sure online operations are keeping pace with customer needs. Solutions such as OpTier BTM help to alert staff to problems in real time so issues such as slow response times are resolved before they impact customer service.
You can find the full results of our survey on the Ipsos website at http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=4797.
In addition, to learn more about how BTM can help insurance companies to improve customer service, listen to our recent webcast with Forrester’s Ellen Carney where we discuss how to manage dynamic IT change in a complex insurance environment.
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1.
Rob Vollum | June 8, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Insurance companies have a LOOOOONG way to go before they reach the level of “acceptable” in customer service, especially online. My healthy family makes little use of our excellent health care policy, and the paperwork relative to the benefits requested is still mind-numbing to me. Co-pay at the doc; bills that show up in the mail showing what insurance didn’t pay; “explanation of benefits (THIS IS NOT A BILL)” mailings that vaguely describe some service that happened; bills for the same service that show up long after payments should have been processed. And there’s nothing that lets you tie it all together! I’m sure I overpay, because when I get a bill for $30 that I’m pretty sure we’ve already dealt with, I just write another check saying that it’s not worth the hour that it would take to straighten it out.
I became truly frustrated/scared/annoyed as we dealt with the last year of my mother-in-law’s life, from the insurance perspective. I’ve never seen a more disconnected, confusing array of paperwork in my life. I guess it’s all straight now since there’s no more mail, but you could put a gun to my head and I couldn’t give a confident answer about that.
To the point of this article, I can’t imagine any other way right now to straighten out a problem other than picking up the phone, calling, and wasting (another) hour wading through the various representatives. Online presence for this sort of thing is just not there.
For online support: what’s so hard about having an “event” (like “Johnny’s Appendectomy”) with a list of clearly-labeled postings against that event (charges and payments). It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.