Three wins for Zurich at the Insurance Times Awards
12/15/2022
Insurer Zurich had a winning streak at the latest Insurance Times awards, scoring a hat trick by taking home awards for Commercial Insurer of the Year, Excellence in eTrade, and Customer Champion of the Year.
The Insurance Times Awards are Insurance Times’ flagship awards, designed to recognise excellence and innovation across the breadth of UK general insurance. Judged by independent panels of experts from across the sector, they celebrate outstanding achievement and honour the year’s best and brightest.
Here’s a round-up of the awards we won and why:
Commercial Insurer of the Year
In a competitive category, Zurich came out on top demonstrating that our commitment to delivering for our customers, brokers and partners is being recognised.
Our strategy is centred around offering a great service through digital innovations and strong customer-centric propositions, underpinned by our core values and commitment to a sustainable future. This award is testament to the work we have done to deliver against this.
Excellent in eTrade
Zurich’s digital trading model enables instant visibility of all SME quotes. This ensures our empowered underwriters can see every single SME quote in real time, even those that are self-served.
“Awards like these are testament to the hard work of our teams and what they do every day to exceed the expectations of customers and brokers”, says Will Edwards, Head of SME, Zurich UK. “We’ve focused hard on making it quicker and easier to interact and trade with us, and we’re incredibly grateful to be recognised for our efforts. “
Over the last year, Zurich has had an unrelenting focus on transforming business, with a focus on delivering for customers and brokers. Significant changes have been made to our operational set up to enhance our eTrade capabilities and put brokers at the heart of our eTrade transformation, including our SME Live Chat functionality, an accessible platform that put brokers directly in touch with experienced underwriters. With 99% of decisions being made locally, Zurich’s live chat representatives are made up of expert underwriters who are committed to answering queries as quickly as possible – many queries are dealt with in under 30 minutes.
We’ve simplified our service and underwriting to make dealing with us even easier. These improvements have helped us to receive 5 stars for both Zurich Online and Acturis trading by brokers in the Insurance Times 2022 eTrade survey.
Customer Champion of the Year
Following on from our Customer Experience win at the 2022 British Insurance Awards, we are delighted to have been recognised again for the transformation and continuous improvement of our customer experience strategy.
In 2021, Zurich have embarked on a journey to build stronger relationships and adapt to changing customer needs, launching a new Customer Experience strategy across the organisation as part of Zurich’s commitment to our purpose and values. To bring the strategy to life, Zurich focused on changing internal cultures to be more customer centric including:
- A UK-wide engagement programme delivered through new customer experience training initiatives
- A UK Customer Scorecard to improve the visibility of customer metrics at Executive level
- Development of our pan-UK Customer Forum to spot common themes and solutions to challenges
- Customer Experience Dashboards created for each business area to track current customer-led initiatives against the strategy
These shifts in internal practices have led to improved engagement throughout the customer lifecycle through personalisation, increasing the frequency and clarity of our communications and introducing new channels to make it easier for customers to contact us.
“Two out of Two! We are proud to have won Customer Champion of the Year at the Insurance Times Awards, following our Customer Champion Award at the British Insurance Awards in the summer,” says Richard Pash, UK Chief Customer Officer, Zurich UK. These accolades reflect the hard work being put in by teams across the business, and also recognition from the industry of the ambitious journey that we are on. Great customer experiences are about getting the basics right, but also about wowing customers, and leaving them with a strong memory of their interaction with us”
In addition to the three awards won on the night, Zurich were shortlisted for a further nine categories:
- General Insurer of the Year
- Personal Lines Insurer of the Year
- Insurer CEO’s CEO of the Year - Tim Bailey
- Excellent in Technology – Claims
- Insurer Innovation of the Year
- Insurer Diversity and Inclusion Excellence Award
- Marketing Campaign of the Year - B2C
- Excellence in Professional Development
- Legal Claims Partner of the Year (with DAC Beachcroft)
