Good service almost always guarantees customer satisfaction. And ‘checking how good the service is’ - has become second nature to us, during our purchase process. Be it a  cozy dinner at a new restaurant in town, an expensive gadget that you plan to show-off to your friends or a digital bank that you plan to open an account with - you no longer make any decisions, without knowing if you’ll get great service! 

But, do you follow the same logic when it comes to buying something with long-term implications on your family’s finances - like Term Insurance too? 

Maybe the better question is - Can you? This is exactly what we set out to answer.

Let’s begin… at the beginning.

The term insurance customer journey is an awfully long one, sometimes panning decades. 

• It all begins with you doing meticulous research, comparison and choosing the perfect product for your needs.
• In case you’re buying the term plan online - you’ll likely make the payment soon after your basic eligibility criteria is verified. And once the payment goes through - you wait. 
• You wait for the insurance company to get in touch with you, to get a medical history and other details required to assess your profile further - before deciding whether or not to give you the policy (and at what premium?)
• This is the period when you’ll have maximum questions about policy features, terms and conditions.
• If you face any issues or have any doubts, you have a toll-free number that you’ve to dial to get in touch with them.

Now - how quickly you’re able to reach a representative of the company, and how smoothly they resolve your concerns is where you’ll get the first insight into their service commitment. 

3 Situations when an insurer’s Customer Service is at test

1️⃣ Service after you make the payment

Post-sales service comes into play as soon as you make the payment. As you provide the insurer with all the information they need, you go through a lot of back-and-forth before the policy document reaches you!

2️⃣ Service after your policy is issued

During the course of your term, there might be situations when you want to understand your policy better or alter it. You might want to change how you pay premiums, or change your nominee details. You’ll connect with the insurer’s service team for this as well. 

3️⃣ Service for your family, during claim settlement

While the thought might be unsettling, you must think about what your family would be going through at the time of the claim. They would have just suffered an irreparable loss - and have also just realised the financial burden closing in on them. They want to get in touch with the insurer quickly - and receive the claim as soon as possible. 

A good service-oriented insurance representative would be well-prepared for all these situations and adequately informed about the intricacies of the plan sold, as well as your needs. They should be patient in their approach to answering your queries without pushing you towards unnecessary features.  They should be quick at providing support - and helpful when they do so, instead of going around in circles. 

So - how can you know whether the customer service of a particular insurance company is good or not? 

Claim Settlement Ratio is a dumb ratio to select insurance. 

Many financial advisors recommend using a Claim Settlement Ratio as a way to know if an insurance company is a good one. Insurers would flaunt a high ratio as the top reason why you should buy your policy from them!

But the Claim Settlement Ratio is flawed. While it gives the ratio of the total number of claims settled by an insurer to the total number of claims received in a given year - it doesn't really indicate whether any 'valid claims' were rejected or 'invalid/ fraudulent claims' settled.  

Further, it gives no insight into the quality of claims experience your family will receive - at a time when you'll not be around anymore. 

What is an ideal solution if Claim Settlement Ratio does not help?

Things have changed. 

Recently, we launched a platform - Beshak⭐Ratings where we’ve analysed some unique aspects of the insurance journey that no insurance platform has explored before. 

One such aspect is ‘customer service.’ We put the service infrastructure of insurance companies to test and made a detailed assessment of the quality and speed of their service. 

To understand which insurers provide the best quality service, Beshak⭐Ratings takes into consideration 3 metrics - 

1️⃣ Response time on Toll-free

Our in-house research team tracked the average time it takes for a human to get in touch with you when you connect with the company on their toll-free number. This directly impacts customer satisfaction or disappointment with the insurance company.

2️⃣ Response time on Twitter

Insurers have leveraged social media channels, especially Twitter, to improve easy communication with customers. Our research team tracked a variety of metrics such as how long does it take for the team to get in touch with the user, no. of tweets unanswered/ redirected to another service platform etc. 

3️⃣ % of complaints received for after-sales service

There are a lot of customers that are dissatisfied with insurance companies after they make the payment for a policy. Our team dug deeper and analysed the percentage of customers that were unhappy with the after-sales service. 

What’s more?

Apart from customer service, we’ve also analysed and rated term products based on other metrics like claims experience, product benefits, and put them in the order of impact and importance to help you purchase the right term insurance product. 

You can check out Beshak⭐Ratings here - it is completely free and can be accessed by all our community members.

If you have a question related to the customer service of insurance companies, you can post it on our forum and get responses from experts within 6-8 hours!