Customer experience

For the second straight year, MetLife leads life insurers in annuity considerations through the first three quarters, ended Sept. 30, 2011. Prudential Financial and Jackson National Life Group round out the top three in the rankings released by SNL.

According to data from ACSI LLC, P&C insurers are improving customer satisfaction, while life insurers are steady and health insurers are slightly declining. For its American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), ACSI annually conducts interviews with approximately 70,000 consumers and plugs the information into an econometric model to measure satisfaction with a wide range of industries, products and large companies. The results are released on a monthly basis, with all measures reported using a scale of 0 to 100, and this month it was the insurance industry’s turn.

While the insurance industry was an early adopter of mobile technology for basic communication functions, it has lagged in developing and implementing internal and customer-facing applications.

Humana Inc. has acquired Anvita Health, a health care analytics company. Humana uses Anvita's Insight engine currently; Anvita Health will continue to operate independently as a subsidiary of Humana.

The industry constantly hears about the problem of retiring knowledge workers and that young people aren’t drawn to insurance careers. The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of New York (IIABNY) is doing something about it. On December 7 the association hosted more than 50 high school students who participated in InVEST, an insurance industry classroom-to-career education program.

Fledgling social network offers unique potential if search engine personalization comes to fruition.

Many companies still operate in the dark while unknown numbers of customers are turned away by websites suffering slow or tedious processes.

While insurance products are inherently complex, interacting with insurance companies should not be.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has published a final rule, with a comment period, establishing health insurers' "medical loss ratios," including provisions to account for ICD-10 conversion costs.

Competition and customer expectations leave little room for error when it comes to website performance, and that pressure only increases with customers using mobile platforms.