What kind of locks has your home been fitted with? Is it a British Standard lock? What’s the combined value of all the computer equipment in your home? What is the rebuild value of your home?
As brokers and insurers, you want to ask as many questions as possible in order to give your customers the best cover possible. But for many consumers of home and buildings insurance, the number and type of questions asked to feel more like an interrogation as opposed to a simple fact-finding mission.
It makes switching to a new provider of home insurance a real bugbear for customers. The quiz-like structure that insurers present consumers with makes it even more onerous as they are inundated with forms that ask rather technical questions that they don’t know the answer to.
Capitalising on this frustration, and the lack of action from most insurers to make forms more user-friendly, is Uinsure. The company has partnered with data start-up WhenFresh to launch a ‘zero questions asked’ initiative at the point of quote.
Uinsure has said that it has completely stripped back its question set so that only the homeowner’s title, name, date of birth and postcode need to be completed before a binding quote from their home insurance is returned from a panel of leading insurers.
Uinsure said they have achieved this by ‘integrating with several trusted data sources, meaning that, once the postcode has been entered, the information about the property is provided – meaning no assumptions are made.’
It claims the added benefit is that advisors get time back to advise rather than inputting data into lengthy question sets. Once the quote is returned, advisors can then tailor the insurance to customers’ needs.
This definitely sounds like a less convoluted and complex formula than the current industry norm. But while this pledge to reduce questions could be quite disruptive it’s by no means the first company to try and make things easier for customers in this way.
This initiative comes after Aviva tried to simplify home insurance quotes with its very own campaign ‘Get a quote not a quiz’, which it launched back in January 2018.
When it announced its pledge to make things simpler, Aviva highlighted that two in five (38%) UK adults with home insurance say that he questions they had to ask were as hard, if not harder as GCSE exam questions.
What’s more, one in three (32%) have given up on an application because it took too long, or they didn’t have the right information at hand.
Most (76%) agree that the home insurance industry must do more to make it quicker, simpler and cheaper to take out the right insurance policies.
Back in 2018, Aviva’s solution to transforming the insurance buying process was to remove unnecessary underwriting questions and ending duplication for customers. For them, it was only essential that customers confirmed a few key pieces of information. Otherwise, they would get the information they needed from other sources such as Land Registry data and from information that customers had previously provided.
They said that not only would this save time for customers but also reduce the risk of a home insurance claim to be rejected.
Although Uinsure and Aviva have first-mover advantage when it comes to simplifying forms for home insurance customers, they don’t have to be the last cover providers to make such a move.
At SchemeServe we know that some in the profession have contributed to the poor reputation for making things complicated for customers. But it really doesn’t have to be this way in 2019 and beyond. We go to great lengths to significantly reduce question set sizes for our customers. Insurers might need some specific information but it doesn’t have to always come from the customer.
A simple call to us could provide you with a solution to hack out all those complexities in your online forms – making the process smoother for your customer and saving everyone a lot of time and money in the process.
If you’re worried that you’re putting customers off your home contents insurance products because of the volume of questions you ask, give us at SchemeServe a call and we could offer you some advice.
Image sourced from Pixabay
