Customers Don’t Want to Buy Insurance from Big Brother

Celent sought to understand whether customers were ready to receive messages from the insurance industry that advances in analytics, Big Data, and social technology could allow. The answer from 2,642 US and UK customers was no.

On a scale of hating our messages to loving them, the mean response to our survey was at best neutral, and, for most of the messages, much nearer to the hate end of the scale.

However, this simple analysis hides some subtleties. Each message has fans who said they would love to receive it from a financial institution.

In the report Customers Don’t Want to Buy Insurance from Big Brother, Celent examines the responses and seeks to help insurers understand how to recognise groups likely to respond well to them, and those that would respond badly.

“Most people will hate receiving messages that imply the organisation has gone a step further in understanding their data. Either we’re too early, or this must be an opt-in process,” says Craig Beattie, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Insurance Group and author of the report, “What surprised us, though, was that each message had people who would love to receive it. Given that this was typically in the younger age groups, we’re going to be seeing this kind of interaction in the future.”

This report looks at the prospect for more context-aware messaging to customers linked to financial products, and the likely more favourable responses to such messages in the future.