TL;DR

Insurance has the lowest Net Promoter Score (NPS) of any industry, averaging around 23 across carriers according to industry benchmarking reports. The issue is not that insurers avoid collecting feedback. Most do collect it. About 70% of carriers have a Voice of Customer (VoC) program of some kind, but only one-third say those programs are actually helping them solve problems, and just 11% reach advanced VoC maturity.

What separates the programs that work from the ones that don't usually comes down to when feedback is collected, whether the open-text responses are actually being read, and whether there is a real process for following up. This guide covers the voice of customer best practices that make the biggest difference in insurance specifically.

Voice of Customer Best Practices for Insurance Companies

 The six practices below are built around how insurance actually works: the high-stakes touchpoints, the broker relationships, the renewal cycles, and the claims moments that define whether a policyholder stays or leaves. Each one addresses a specific gap that most insurance VoC programs leave open. Together, they form a customer strategy that turns feedback into retention. 

Best Practice 1: Survey at Interaction Touchpoints, Not on a Fixed Schedule

Policyholders don't interact with their insurer often. When they do, the interaction tends to be significant: filing a claim, renewing a policy, or cancelling one. These are the moments when feedback is worth collecting.

Many VoC programs send NPS surveys on a quarterly schedule regardless of whether the policyholder has had any recent interaction with the carrier. The response rates on those surveys tend to be low, and the feedback is hard to connect to any specific experience because there often isn't one to reference.

Feedback collected right after a real interaction is much more useful. For guidance on structuring those surveys, see our guide to voice of customer surveys. Here are the five moments in insurance where it matters most:

FNOL uses the Customer Effort Score (CES) because the most useful question at that point is how easy it was for the policyholder to report their claim, not how satisfied they are overall. High effort at FNOL is often an early sign that the rest of the claims experience will be difficult. Catching that early gives the team a chance to intervene before the claim closes.

The cancellation survey is one that many teams skip, assuming the policyholder has already made their decision. But it consistently produces some of the most honest and useful feedback a carrier can collect. Policyholders who are leaving have very little reason to soften their answers, and the reasons they give feed directly into product, pricing, and communication improvements.

Best Practice 2: Treat Claims Feedback as Your Most Important Retention Signal

When a policyholder files a claim, they are often dealing with a stressful situation and paying close attention to how the carrier responds. How that experience goes has a significant impact on whether they renew and whether they recommend the carrier to others.

According to Accenture's research, 30% of policyholders who were dissatisfied with their claims experience switched carriers within two years, and another 47% were actively considering doing so. That makes claims feedback some of the most important data a VoC program can collect. Pairing it with strong voice of customer analytics is what turns those numbers into decisions.

Most carriers collect it, but there are a few ways they commonly underuse it.

Best Practice 3: Include Brokers and Agents in Your VoC Program

Most insurance VoC programs are focused entirely on policyholders. In personal and commercial lines, that approach misses an important source of insight.

Brokers and agents are often the main point of contact for policyholders. They explain coverage, manage expectations, handle renewals, and deal with questions when issues come up. When they run into recurring problems with a carrier's processes, those problems often affect their clients as well, sometimes before any individual policyholder thinks to raise a concern directly with the carrier.

A broker who places 40 policies with a carrier will encounter the same quoting delays, the same gaps in claims communication, and the same policy documentation issues across all 40 clients. They develop a clear picture of what is and isn't working. That perspective doesn't make its way back to the carrier unless there is a structured way to capture it.

Running a short quarterly survey with your top broker panel, one of many voice of customer methodologies worth building into your program, covering areas like quote turnaround, documentation clarity, and claims update frequency, gives you an early signal on systemic issues that policyholder feedback alone won't surface. The responses should be reviewed and routed the same way policyholder feedback is.

If your insurance customer surveys are only reaching policyholders, you're working with an incomplete picture of the customer experience.

Best Practice 4: Use Open-Text Feedback to Identify Process and Policy Gaps

Two issues come up more than almost anything else when insurance open-text feedback is analyzed carefully.

The first is policyholders who didn't understand what their policy covered until they tried to make a claim. What seemed clear when the policy was purchased turned out to be ambiguous or misleading when it mattered most. This mismatch is a significant driver of disputes, negative reviews, and churn, and it rarely shows up clearly in satisfaction scores alone.

The second is policyholders who felt uninformed during the claims process. "I didn't know what was happening or what to expect next" is one of the most common themes in claims feedback across carriers. In many cases the claim itself was handled correctly. The problem was the lack of communication along the way. That silence during an already stressful period is what leaves a lasting negative impression.

Both of these are problems with processes and language, not with individual staff interactions. Reading the open-text responses regularly, rather than just monitoring average scores, is how teams identify them and make meaningful improvements.

When feedback volume is high, AI thematic analysis makes this manageable. Instead of reading every individual response, teams see the patterns: policy exclusion confusion appearing in a significant share of detractor comments, or lack of claims updates showing up as a recurring driver of low CSAT scores. Platforms like Zonka Feedback surface these themes automatically across surveys, support interactions, and other unstructured feedback sources, so the team can focus on fixing the problems rather than finding them.

Best Practice 5: Close the Loop Before the Renewal Window Closes

Every policyholder who had a poor experience has a natural point at which they can quietly leave: renewal.

A policyholder with a bad claims experience in October and a renewal coming up in January gives the carrier roughly 90 days to reach out and recover the relationship. Once that renewal date passes without contact, the policyholder cancels without any further conversation. There is no complaint and no warning. Just a lapsed policy.

Insurers with strong VoC programs see customer retention increase by up to 55% compared to those who collect feedback but don't close the loop. The survey itself is not what drives that difference. What matters is what happens after the response comes in.

A practical closed-loop process for insurance looks like this:

1. A low CSAT or NPS response triggers an alert to the claims or customer service team
2. An assigned team member follows up with the policyholder within 24 to 48 hours
3. The outcome of that follow-up is logged against the original response
4. If the policyholder's renewal is within 90 days, the account is flagged for proactive outreach before that date

Most teams manage the first step. The carriers with the strongest retention rates manage all four. If your program keeps stalling before the follow-up stage, it helps to understand common reasons VoC programs fail to drive action.

The follow-up call does not need to solve every problem. Many policyholders respond positively simply to being contacted. Knowing that someone read their feedback and reached out is often enough to change their perception of the carrier. That is what closing the loop is designed to do.

Zonka Feedback connects survey responses to workflow triggers so that every low-score response gets assigned, followed up, and tracked through to resolution.

Best Practice 6: Route Feedback to the Teams Who Can Act on It

Claims feedback that only the claims team sees cannot fix a product problem.

If a large share of open-text responses mention confusion about a specific policy exclusion, that is a product and underwriting issue. If recurring low scores point to billing confusion, that is a finance operations conversation. If policyholders are struggling with the digital FNOL process, that is a technology issue. Each of these requires input from a different team, and that team can only act on the feedback if they can see it.

Individual adjusters should have access to their own interaction scores. Regional managers should see patterns across their locations. Product and underwriting teams should see themes related to coverage and policy language. The Customer Experience (CX) leader should have a view of all of it.

When feedback is routed to the teams who can act on it, it stops being a reporting exercise and starts driving actual improvements across the business. The right tools that help route VoC feedback across teams make this routing and visibility much easier to manage.

The carriers seeing the strongest retention numbers are not necessarily the ones with the most advanced technology. They are the ones collecting feedback at the right moments, reading what policyholders actually write, and following up before the renewal window closes.

For more on building this kind of program, see building a VoC program in insurance. For the tools that support it, see our guide to VoC tools for insurance.