Over the past few months, Corporate Insight’s Life & Annuity and P&C Insurance research teams have observed a growing number of insurers embedding on-site user-feedback surveys directly into their public and account owner sites. In many instances, carriers have prioritized capturing satisfaction, task-completion and effort data from users as they navigate their site by launching a pop-up window that prompts users to stop what they are doing and provide feedback.
Through our observations, we found that firms focused on determining two things: whether a user completed a task and how easy it was. We also found noticeable differences emerging in where these surveys appear, how long they run, whether they segment customers and financial advisors and how they address the concern of user privacy.
Because these surveys are triggered dynamically and can vary by page and session, our observations reflect the versions encountered organically during our visits and may not capture the full scope of user feedback surveys across carriers, or any variance in survey format a given carrier is running.
Property & Casualty Carriers Lead the Way
Six P&C insurers—Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Erie, Nationwide, Farmers and Allstate—have implemented pop-up surveys to collect feedback on the user experience, by far the most of any vertical. A trio of annuity firms—Transamerica, Guardian and Fidelity—implemented user feedback surveys, while life insurer Prudential rounded out the list of carriers with a documented on-site survey, for a total of 10 firms.
Location Matters
Four insurers—State Farm, Allstate, Guardian and Liberty Mutual—surface user feedback surveys on their policyholder site homepages, while Prudential’s survey appears on its public site homepage. Placing surveys in the highest-visibility location on the entire site may help these firms attract a higher volume of responses. Yet State Farm, Allstate, Liberty Mutual and Prudential each inquire about whether the user accomplished the goal of their visit. Placing that question on the homepage, rather than after a user has navigated to a specific task-oriented page, may be premature, as it risks asking users to evaluate an outcome they haven’t yet had the opportunity to reach.
Robin Mukherjee, CI’s user experience research manager, noted that surveys are best placed after a task. He suggested Logout pages also make for adequate locations for capturing feedback as users exit the site. (It is also possible that CI’s researchers, as frequent return visitors to these sites, see these surveys more often and in different circumstances than other users.)
Several insurers do indeed surface their pop-up surveys on task-oriented pages, leading to a greater probability that the survey will capture feedback from those engaged in accomplishing a specific task. Regardless, each survey located on a task-oriented page that we identified still appeared before a task was complete, potentially limiting the overall effectiveness:
- Nationwide’s Help Us Improve Nationwide survey appears on its policyholder site Preferences page and asks users to specifically rate their experience on that page, while also gauging task completion and accepting general open-ended feedback related to the Preferences page.
- Farmers’ user feedback survey appears on its policyholder site Your Claims page and asks whether the digital claims experience made it easy for users to accomplish their goal. It also measures task completion and requests open-ended feedback about the user’s claims experience.
- Transamerica’s How Was Your Visit? survey populates on the account owner site Policy Overview page. It opens by asking respondents to identify their relationship with the firm as a customer/policyholder or financial professional, eliminating any ambiguity about which respondent type is behind each of the scores that follow. The survey then captures their reason for visiting, whether they achieved their goal, overall satisfaction and ease of use, before asking whether they would like to participate in future research.
- Erie’s survey surfaces on its public site Auto Insurance page and inquires about how easy it was for users to find what they needed, in addition to their reason for visiting the site and their overall rating of the site experience.
In one instance, Liberty Mutual’s survey appeared on the policyholder site Login page before the user logged in. The insurer asked multiple questions that only a logged-in user could answer, including those related to task completion and ease of use, revealing a disconnect between the survey’s placement and the questions it poses.
Measuring Task Completion and Ease of Use Are Top Priorities
A core theme across most surveys encountered was gauging whether users accomplished what they visited the site for and how much effort it took to get there. Measuring task completion was the most common question, with eight carriers—Prudential, Transamerica, Erie, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide and Farmers—each asking for some version of whether the user accomplished the goal of their visit. Most insurers pose the question as a simple binary, but Prudential and Nationwide include a middle option (Still in Progress and Not Yet, respectively) that allows users who are mid-task to acknowledge that they cannot yet judge whether they succeeded.
The second most common question featured in these surveys asks users to weigh in on how easy or difficult their experience was, with seven of the 10 insurers asking some variation of this question. Liberty Mutual, Transamerica and Guardian each use worded scales running from very or extremely easy to very or extremely difficult, while Prudential and Erie utilize zero-to-10 numeric scales. Farmers asks users to indicate the extent to which they agree that the digital claims experience made it easy to accomplish their goal, while Allstate measures task effort and ease of site navigation separately between two questions.
By first asking whether a task was completed and then following up by asking how hard it was to complete, many carriers are prioritizing the measurement of task-completion success rate and ease of use as a means of revealing whether the site is doing its job and if any friction stands in the way.
Giving Users a Voice
Eight of the insurers’ surveys—Guardian, Fidelity, Nationwide, Allstate, Farmers, Erie, Prudential and Liberty Mutual—include an open-ended comment box where users can provide more detailed, specific feedback. These carriers took slightly different approaches to prompting additional open-ended user feedback:
- Guardian, Fidelity and Allstate specifically ask what they could do to improve their website/user experience.
- Prudential asks users what they like about its website if they give a high rating, while asking the inverse if users provide a low rating.
- Nationwide asks for general feedback specifically related to the Preferences page.
- Farmers and Erie simply request users share more about their experience/opinions.
- Liberty Mutual asks users to describe what was easy or challenging in their experience.
By collecting open-ended feedback, these insurers may be able to collect sentiments that extend beyond those expressed through more restrictive multiple-choice, Likert scale and rating-scale response options posed earlier in the survey. Additional feedback may also help carriers to contextualize responses given on previous questions by gaining greater understanding of a user’s opinions.
Qualtrics: The Overwhelming Third-Party Choice
Nearly every carrier enlisted a third-party voice-of-customer platform to build its survey, with seven insurers partnering with Qualtrics: Nationwide, Prudential, Liberty Mutual, Farmers, Allstate, Transamerica and Guardian. State Farm selected Medallia as its third-party voice of customer platform, while Erie partnered with Forsta to power its survey. It isn’t clear whether Fidelity partnered with a voice-of-customer platform, as none were listed within the firm’s survey box.
Privacy First
Five insurers include a privacy, confidentiality or anonymity statement within the survey. Prudential, State Farm, Allstate, Fidelity and Transamerica each urge users not to share any personal or confidential information. State Farm goes so far as to provide specific examples of information users should not share, including SSN, credit/debit card number or medical information. Prudential clarifies that all responses are anonymous, while State Farm adds that responses will be used in accordance with its privacy policy.
Prudential, State Farm and Transamerica display their privacy notice immediately at the start of the survey, while Allstate and Fidelity include their notices directly above open-ended text boxes. The prominent nature of these privacy notice locations is an attempt by these insurers to increase transparency surrounding survey data use practices, potentially helping to foster increased trust between carriers and users, subtly encouraging participation in the survey.
Survey Length and Format Outliers and Differentiators
Allstate is, by far, the biggest outlier when it comes to survey length, with 10 questions total. Although the survey includes a robust set of questions that may collect key information on the user experience, the lack of a visible progress bar, the sheer length of the survey and the disruptive pop-up window may create instances of task abandonment and incomplete survey responses. Robin Mukherjee noted that the best surveys ask two-to-three questions at most and are placed off to the side to avoid creating a time and page-consuming disruption. He observed that Allstate’s choice to include eight multiple-choice questions and two open-ended responses breaks from convention, and that one of the only ways to offset the lengthy survey’s disruptive impact is to provide an incentive for users to complete it, such as entry into a sweepstakes.
Transamerica’s and Prudential’s six-question surveys similarly run well past the two-to-three-question guideline, as does Erie’s five-question survey, though none rival Allstate’s length. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Fidelity and State Farm had the leanest surveys in the set. Fidelity’s survey includes a single 5-star satisfaction rating scale plus one open-ended question inquiring about potential site improvements, while State Farm asks a pair of simple Yes/No questions regarding whether the user accomplished their goal and visited to make changes to their auto policy. These overly short and simplistic surveys, in which users provide only a top-level rating or yes/no answers without a structured follow-up, may limit the usefulness of the survey data in identifying underlying reasons behind user sentiment.
In addition, the Transamerica and Prudential surveys stand out as the only ones that require respondents to specify whether they are a customer/policyholder or financial professional/producer, allowing these firms to segment responses from each audience as it analyzes insights. Transamerica was also the only insurer to use an emoji/smiley-face satisfaction scale, creating a more intuitive and universally understood rating scale for respondents to interpret compared to a 5-star rating satisfaction scale or worded scales. Lastly, Transamerica closes its survey by asking whether the respondent would like to participate in future customer experience research, making it the only carrier in the set to use its feedback survey to recruit users for further studies.
Conclusion
Taken together, these 10 surveys indicate a clear trend: across life, annuity and P&C, carriers increasingly want to hear directly from users while the experience is still fresh, with similarly structured voice-of-customer surveys (many of which are powered by Qualtrics) emerging as a standard tool for accomplishing this goal. Key determinants of a survey’s success include:
- Placement – whether an insurer captures feedback at a meaningful moment or asks users to judge an outcome they have not reached.
- Length – determines whether users are more likely to finish the survey or abandon it after partial completion.
- Privacy – how this concern is addressed may impact respondent trust in the survey.
- Respondent type – segmenting between customers and financial professionals may lead to more precise survey data analysis.
For carriers weighing their own voice-of-customer programs, the question is less whether to deploy a survey than how to design one well. The strongest examples in this set align the survey’s timing with the questions it asks, keep the burden on the user low and give respondents a clear, private channel to explain the scores they leave behind. As more insurers roll these surveys out and refine the ones already live, Corporate Insight will continue to track how they evolve and what the best implementations reveal about listening to customers effectively.
Luke Sassa
Luke Sassa is a research associate on Corporate Insight's insurance team.