The way that the insurance industry responds to the coronavirus crisis was underlined today as new figures showed that consumer and business trust in the sector was on the increase before the pandemic began.
The latest Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) Public Trust Index suggests that overall consumer and SME satisfaction with insurance increased slightly between 2019 and February 2020.
The CII’s research – a survey of 1,000 consumers and 1,000 SMEs – suggests that knowing exactly what an insurance policy covered and excluded was only ranked the seventh most important factor out of 50 for SMEs and the eighth most important factor out of 50 for consumers when buying insurance.
Loyalty, complaint handling, ease of doing business and assessing risk individually was ranked by SMEs as more important when buying and renewing insurance.
For consumers, loyalty, speed of claims, price and complaints handling were ranked as more important.
Matt Connell, director of policy and public affairs at the CII, said that in light of headlines relating to travel and business interruption insurance and the nation’s experience of making claims as a result of the coronavirus it will be “interesting” to see how consumer and SME confidence that policies will pay out for risks that are relevant to them will be affected by their experiences with coronavirus.
He said: “The CII Public Trust Index is the only index that tracks public trust in insurance for consumers and SMEs on a quarterly basis. The data that we have gathered will form an important baseline so that we can understand the impact on trust in insurance of recent events, when we publish the next round of results in the summer.”