Here’s our guide on how to improve customer experience in insurance

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Quick summary

Insurance is built on trust, but poor experiences break it fast. This guide walks you through an 8-step process to help improve customer experience in insurance. Learn how to align teams, tailor experiences, and drive measurable CX improvements across every stage of the policyholder journey.

Why customer experience in insurance still feels broken

Insurance is meant to provide peace of mind, but for many customers, it’s a source of stress. This explains why less than one-third of insurance customers (29%) say they’re satisfied with their provider. 

From confusing policy details to clunky claims processes, the experience often feels disjointed and frustrating. Even worse, most of these issues are recurring gaps in the customer journey that go unnoticed until customers churn.

In this TheyDo guide, you’ll learn eight practical ways to improve customer experience in insurance by fixing the overall journey, not just the touchpoints. 

Why listen to us

At TheyDo, we help large organizations turn scattered customer journeys into a shared system of action. Insurance providers like Manitoba Public Insurance use TheyDo to surface high-impact issues, connect teams, and act on what matters most. With features like Journey AI and structured taxonomy, we align CX efforts across departments so improvements happen faster, and customers feel the difference.

What is customer experience in insurance?

Customer experience (CX) is the overall perception a customer has of your business based on every interaction across their journey. It covers all touchpoints, from researching policies and getting quotes to filing claims and receiving support.

In insurance, customer experience is how those moments connect over time to shape trust, satisfaction, and loyalty. A smooth onboarding process, clear communication during claims, and timely renewals all contribute to how customers feel about their provider.

This is not to be confused with customer journey, which is the path customers take across those interactions. It maps out each stage, like researching, buying, onboarding, and support.

In simpler terms, the journey is what happens, and the experience is how it feels.

Why good customer experience matters in insurance

  • Reduce churn before it starts: Identify pain points in claims, support, or onboarding that drive customers away and fix them before they leave.

  • Drive loyalty and referrals: Create consistently positive experiences across the journey to boost renewal rates and generate word-of-mouth growth.

  • Lower service costs: Eliminate repetitive service issues by improving broken or unclear touchpoints that cause support volume to spike.

  • Unify teams around the customer: Give every team a shared understanding of the journey to align efforts and break down operational silos.

  • Spot high-impact fixes early: Use journey insights to surface and prioritize experience gaps like Manitoba Public Insurance did with TheyDo.

How to improve customer experience in insurance

Step 1: Define your cx goals and align internal teams

Improving customer experience starts with knowing exactly what you want to fix. Your CX goals should directly address the pain points that drive customer dissatisfaction. So instead of vague objectives like "improve customer satisfaction," focus on specific outcomes such as:

  • Reduce claim processing time from 14 days to 5 days

  • Increase first-call resolution to 85%

  • Achieve 90% understanding of policy terms at purchase, etc.

Once goals are clear, align your internal teams. Customer experience is often rough because each team chases its own KPIs. This leads to customer frustration.

Here’s how to stay aligned across teams:

  • Involve all key teams early: Make sure everyone understands the shared CX goals and their role in reaching them.

  • Make goals visible: Stop tracking department-only metrics. Instead, display customer-focused goals where everyone can see them:

  • Map customer handoffs: Identify every point where a customer moves between departments. Each transfer is a chance for things to go wrong. Tools like TheyDo give teams a shared, real-time view of what customers experience and where journeys fall short. 

Finally, secure leadership support by showing the business value. Frame your goals in terms that leadership cares about:

  • Higher retention = more profit

  • Happy customers = lower marketing costs

  • Better experiences = fewer complaints and rework

On TheyDo, you can identify your CX goals so that every team is aligned on what the focus is and track the impact of your activities on the business. 

Step 2: Gather and connect the right customer data

Once you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to bring in the data that shows what’s really happening. In insurance, this data lives in many places: support systems, claims software, CRMs, and customer surveys.

To improve CX, you need to pull these insights together and connect them to specific steps in the journey.

Start by listing your data sources appropriately:

  • Call center logs (e.g., top 10 reasons customers call after filing a claim)

  • Claims system reports (e.g., average processing times, drop-offs)

  • CRM or policy management data (e.g., abandoned applications, renewals)

  • Surveys and feedback forms (e.g., NPS, CSAT linked to journey stages)

Then:

  • Export or sync this data into a shared workspace

  • Label each insight by journey stage (e.g., “Onboarding” or “Post-Claim”)

  • Identify where gaps or handoffs cause delays or confusion

TheyDo solves this by bringing all your data into one single view. Our customer journey framework helps you centralize customer journeys into a structured system. This makes it easier to analyze and manage across the organization.

Step 3: Map the real journeys your customers take

With your data in a central view, the next step is to understand how customers move through your insurance processes, not just how you think they do. That means mapping the full customer journey, from initial research and quoting to onboarding, claims, and renewal.

Platforms like Theydo have a customer journey mapping tool, which helps you visualize and manage customer experiences in one place so everyone sees the same picture and can act on it.

When mapping, start with the journeys closely tied to your goals. For example, if you’re trying to reduce churn after claims, then it's best to map out the claims experience in detail. Who does the customer speak to? How long do they wait? Where do they feel uncertain?

Be sure to include both digital and offline touchpoints:

  • Website visits

  • Phone support

  • Paper mail or in-person steps

  • App notifications or chatbot conversations

Each step should show the customer's actions, thoughts, and feelings, not just the background work of all your systems. This is where insurers often uncover hidden gaps, like confusing communications or duplicated steps between teams. 

Step 4: Segment customers to tailor the experience

Not all customers experience insurance the same way. A first-time policyholder, a high-value business client, and a longtime auto customer will all move through the same journey differently. 

This is why segmentation is important. It prevents you from applying a generic fix to every experience problem.

Start by grouping customers based on meaningful differences:

  • Policy type (e.g., auto, home, life)

  • Customer lifecycle stage (e.g., new, renewing, long-time)

  • Channel preference (e.g,. digital-first vs. phone-based)

  • Behavior patterns (e.g., frequent claimants, high NPS scorers)

Next, revisit your journey maps and tag the key differences in how each segment experiences specific steps. For example:

  • New customers might struggle most during onboarding.

  • High-value clients may expect faster, more personalized claims handling.

  • Digital-first users may drop off if self-service options are limited.

Tools like TheyDo let you connect customer personas directly to journeys, so teams can compare how each group moves through the experience. When you understand what matters to different segments, you can design improvements that drive results.

Step 5: Identify friction points and missed opportunities

With your journey mapped and your data connected, now it’s time to look closely at what’s making customers leave. 

In insurance, friction often hides in the everyday: unclear next steps, repeated questions, or waiting too long for updates.

Start by reviewing the journey one stage at a time. Ask:

  • Where do customers get stuck or drop off?

  • Where do complaints or negative feedback spike?

  • Which steps take longer than expected or require follow-ups?

Watch for:

  • Customers submitting documents twice because systems don’t sync

  • Policyholders calling just to “check claim status”

  • Delays in renewal reminders causing unintentional lapses

  • Confusing onboarding messages that leave new customers unsure

Use customer quotes, call transcripts, or survey comments to validate what the data shows. Look for patterns in how customers describe their frustration, for example:

  • “I didn’t know what documents I needed” → points to unclear onboarding

  • “I kept getting bounced between departments” → signals a handoff issue

  • “No one told me how long it would take” → highlights a communication gap

Group similar feedback by journey stage. Then tag the exact step where that friction occurs. This helps teams move beyond assumptions and understand what’s actually broken using the customer’s own words.

TheyDo’s Journey AI makes this process faster. It transforms raw customer data into actionable insights by mining, enriching, and summarizing feedback across journeys. This helps you quickly identify opportunities and enhance CX. 

Step 6: Prioritize actions based on impact

After mapping journeys, spotting friction points, and segmenting your customers, you’ll likely uncover a long list of issues to address. But not everything needs fixing right away. Some have a higher priority than others.

Prioritization helps you focus on the changes that will make the biggest difference.

You can start by scoring each opportunity using TheyDo’s built-in framework based on these three lenses of innovation:

  • Customer impact: How painful is this for the customer? Does it affect trust, retention, or satisfaction?

  • Business impact: Does fixing it improve key metrics like claim costs, renewals, or NPS?

  • Effort to fix: Is the fix simple (updating a message) or complex (overhauling a backend system)?

This structured approach ensures you evaluate each issue fairly and consistently.

Visit TheyDo’s guide on how to prioritize opportunities to learn the mechanics of scoring and ranking in context. This tool generates a visual opportunity matrix, which allows you to filter and compare issues easily.

Step 7: Assign ownership and track progress

Even with clear priorities, CX improvements stall when no one owns the next step. Insurance journeys often stretch across departments, which makes ownership unclear. That’s why assigning responsibility is just as important as identifying what to fix.

For each opportunity you’ve prioritized, assign:

  • A clear owner (not just a team, an accountable individual)

  • A defined journey step related to the issue

  • A deadline or review date to ensure follow-through

Then track how changes progress over time. Are fixes being implemented? Is the customer experience improving at that step?

With TheyDo, you can assign ownership to tasks, monitor progress over time, and coordinate actions across journeys, so nothing gets lost between planning and execution.

Use a shared view where teams can:

  • See which opportunities are active, planned, or completed

  • Filter by journey stage, customer segment, or impact area

  • Comment or update in context so nothing slips through the cracks

This avoids siloed efforts and keeps everyone aligned on what’s being improved and why it matters. 

Step 8: Continuously test, measure, and improve

Customer expectations change, and so should your CX. What works today may create friction tomorrow, especially in insurance, where policies, processes, and regulations evolve fast.

Build simple feedback loops into every major journey to measure customer experience. For example:

  • After onboarding, ask new customers what felt unclear.

  • After a claim, measure satisfaction and time to resolution.

  • Before renewal, check if customers understand their coverage.

Track these insights by journey stage, not just by department. That way, you can see which touchpoints are improving and which need more work.

Run small tests before rolling out big changes. Update one message, one form, or one workflow at a time. Then measure the impact using journey-specific metrics like:

  • Drop-off rate

  • Call volume per step

  • Customer sentiment or verbatim feedback

Use a journey-centric framework to keep feedback and improvements organized across teams. When CX becomes an ongoing habit, not a one-time fix, insurers have a higher chance of staying ahead of problems and consistently delivering better experiences.

Improve your insurance customer experience with TheyDo

Customer expectations are rising, and fragmented experiences won’t keep up. TheyDo helps insurers turn complex journeys into a clear system for action by connecting teams, data, and insights in one place. From claims to renewals, you’ll know exactly where to improve and how to do it at scale.

Join leading insurers who use TheyDo to turn real journeys into better customer experiences at scale.