A J.D. Power and Associates report credits policy bundling with happy customers.
The latest J.D. Power and Associates report, called the 2012 National Homeowners Insurance Study, has just been released, and it showed that the satisfaction that customers have with their insurers is higher when their policies are bundled with other types of coverage.
This is the twelf
th time that this annual study has been performed.
It is designed to provide a measure of the satisfaction that customers feel with their homeowners insurance companies by taking five different factors into account: policy offerings, price, billing and payment, interaction, and claims.
In 2012, the average overall satisfaction level with homeowners insurance companies was 785.
This was based on a 1,000 point scale, and represents the highest that the insurers have achieved in the entire time that the study has been performed. It showed an improvement of 16 points over the numbers in 2011.
Moreover, there was an improvement of 19 points in the satisfaction of customers who had bundled their homeowners insurance policies with other types of coverage, such as an auto policy. This was a tremendous 10 points of improvement over consumers who had their home coverage at a different insurer than their other policies.
The satisfaction levels were measured to be higher among all five of the factors this year when compared to the levels in 2011. The largest increases were seen in the area of policy offerings (with an improvement of 35 points), as well as the billing and payment section (which rose by 27 points).
Those improvements were noticeably larger among customers who had bundled their homeowners insurance and other coverages (which rose by 39 points) than it was among those who had not combined their policies at the same insurer (where increases were at 25 points). One of the primary differentiators among the policyholders who bundled and those that did not was the discounts that were available to them.
The report indicated that the competitive pricing offered when homeowners insurance policies are bundled with other products made a significant difference in the overall satisfaction experienced by the customer.