Proving integrity is the most important way for advisers to build trust with consumers taking out protection insurance, according to Sue Helmont, marketing director at AIG Life.
Speaking at the Protection Review’s annual conference in London today, Helmont told delegates that proving competence, reliability, empathy and integrity were the most important factors in creating and maintaining trust with customers.
Drawing on the work of academic Rachel Botsman, Helmont told delegates that while creating transparency with consumers was important, transparency was the antithesis of trust and not a “magical cure”.
Helmont explained that showing competence meant demonstrating you have the skills, experience and knowledge to deliver on the things you say you are going to do.
Reliability is the feeling you can depend on someone. In the protection industry, this means being responsive, answering queries, emails, picking up the phone and showing consistency such as delivering claim stats which show consistent pay outs over time.
The final two key components are empathy – demonstrating that the brand cares about its consumers and the component Helmont regards as the most important – integrity – where intentions are backed up by actions.
‘Asymmetry of power’
Building that trust is so important, Helmont said, because of the way the industry is perceived in an age where consumers put trust in individuals and strangers and other human beings over “anonymous institutions”.
“The insurance business model is one where we always have the upper hand. There’s an asymmetry of power,” she said.
“The consumer gives us money and we have it and they feel disadvantaged because it’s not a level playing field and we collect the premiums for years. So there is an asymmetry of information.
“They don’t really know what the policy says but we do – so they see the faceless institution as one that doesn’t want to pay out because it means more profits for us.”