How to Conduct a Client Satisfaction Survey for Insurance Customers

To set your insurance business up for future success, you need more than just a steady pipeline of leads. You also need a stable base of customers who can continue to renew policies, add coverage lines, refer you to new prospects, and more. Getting this stable base requires having satisfied clients. Knowing how to conduct a client satisfaction survey can help you determine whether you’re on the right track.

If a customer satisfaction survey tells you that you generally have happy customers, then you have a good indicator that you can keep doing what you’re doing, such as with your new customer onboarding and renewal processes. But if a client satisfaction survey reveals gaps, you might decide to make some customer experience changes. Seeing how your client satisfaction changes over time can also help you determine what’s working and what’s not as you try to improve customer retention and customer loyalty.

In this article, we’ll explore how to conduct a client satisfaction survey for insurance customers, starting with building out survey questions all the way through analyzing survey responses.  

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What Is a Client Satisfaction Survey?

A client satisfaction survey can be any sort of questionnaire that asks clients how they feel about your products or services. Some client satisfaction surveys are formal surveys with multiple questions and space for open-ended answers. Others might be one-question surveys that ask respondents to choose from a smiling face, a neutral face, or a frowning face. 

Client Satisfaction Survey Questions

An integral part of knowing how to conduct a client satisfaction survey is knowing what survey questions to ask. There’s a lot of flexibility regarding what to include. At one end of the spectrum, you might simply ask if a client was satisfied with an interaction, such as asking:

“Yes or no: were you satisfied with the experience of purchasing an insurance policy?”

Or, you might decide to include more specific, in-depth questions. You can start by asking clients to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-10, so you have more detail than a simple yes/no response and can track improvement over time. You also might ask about different areas of satisfaction, asking multiple questions, like, on a scale of 1-10:

• “How satisfied were you with the ease of purchasing your insurance policy?”
• “How satisfied were you with the pricing of your insurance policy?”
• “How satisfied were you with communicating with your insurance agent?”

Since there are so many ways you can go with a client satisfaction survey, it may take a bit of trial and error to see what works best. In general, though, aim to keep the number of survey questions short.

“Every question you include should have a well-defined purpose and a strong case for being included. Otherwise, send it to the chopping block,” advises Help Scout, a customer service software company.

Client Satisfaction Survey Uses

Part of figuring out what client satisfaction survey questions to ask means determining how you will use a customer satisfaction survey. You might use client satisfaction surveys to determine popular customer satisfaction metrics like:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: Measures the percentage of satisfied customers 
• Net promoter score® (NPS®): Measures the likelihood of customers acting as promoters of your brand and being loyal customers (beyond just being satisfied)
• Customer effort score (CES): Measures how much effort a customer has to put into interactions, e.g., for filing an insurance claim

Figuring out these metrics can require different types and phrasings of questions. You then might use responses in different ways. For example, you might want to track your CSAT over time to see how your overall customer satisfaction levels change. Or, you might decide not to focus too much on the satisfaction scores themselves but instead use client satisfaction surveys primarily as a way for clients to share feedback that can then be used as testimonials or reviews (assuming you get their permission).

Conducting a Client Satisfaction Survey

Determining how to conduct a client satisfaction survey requires figuring out the different components of a survey. Fortunately, many customer satisfaction survey software tools exist that make it easier to go from start to finish. From SurveyMonkey to Simplesat to Qualtrics, many different types of platforms can be used to create surveys and in some cases put them to use, such as by analyzing trends and making it easy for customers to turn survey responses into reviews.

Building the Survey

The first step for conducting a client satisfaction survey is to build out the survey itself. That means making survey design choices like picking questions, answer options (e.g., open-ended, multiple-choice, a rating scale), and operational matters, like how customers can progress through a survey. You don’t want to make answering a survey too difficult, especially considering customers might have survey fatigue from being asked for feedback from other companies.

“If you require an answer to every single question—even the most rudimentary ones—you’re going to find that a lot of respondents will leave your survey. So keep the required questions to a minimum and let them skip what they want,” advises SurveyMonkey.

Sending the Survey

Next, you need to send out the survey. While it’s possible to create a survey yourself and send it out directly via email, that might not be very efficient or look all that professional. An alternative would be to direct customers to a landing page that has a form where they can answer a few customer satisfaction questions. Or, you could send out an online survey via a customer survey platform, which can help keep everything streamlined.

Keep in mind that you might want to provide an incentive (assuming doing so follows relevant regulations for your business) to get more customers to complete a survey, much as you might provide referral rewards. 

Collecting Survey Responses

After sending out the survey, you need to be able to collect survey responses. Figuring out a good way to send out the survey ties directly into this area. You probably don’t want to go through the hassle of manually compiling email responses, which is why using customer survey software, or at least some sort of online form, can be valuable. That way, all the responses can automatically get collected and stored in an easy-to-access place.

Analyzing the Survey

Lastly, you likely want to analyze customer satisfaction surveys to get the most out of them and see if you’re meeting customer expectations. In some cases that might mean anecdotally reviewing customer feedback from open-ended responses, which can give you a general sense of how customers feel and might point you to specific areas ripe for improvement. But it can also be highly valuable to analyze the hard data from survey results. If you ask customers to rate an experience on a scale of 1-10, for example, it can help to see how the average score moves over time.

Getting More Out of a Client Satisfaction Survey

Client satisfaction surveys can help insurance agents and other insurance professionals understand whether they’re doing enough to keep customers happy and coming back for repeat business. If you can identify areas of dissatisfaction early, before customers start canceling policies, that can help you proactively address problems and retain customers. 

Keep in mind that you can also often use customer satisfaction surveys for additional purposes, such as generating testimonials and reviews. After a client completes a survey, for example, a software tool might ask clients who provided positive responses if they’d like to automatically share their comments on review sites. That way, you can not only learn what your customers think but also spread the word about your insurance business to new prospects.