Insurance runs on trust, but trust is hard to observe directly, which is why Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) carry outsized weight in this industry. Most policyholders only hear from their carrier once a year at renewal, or when something’s gone wrong. With so few touchpoints to build a relationship on, each interaction matters more, and NPS and CSAT are how leadership finds out whether those rare moments are earning loyalty or quietly pushing someone toward a competitor. NPS surveys ask whether a customer would actually recommend you; CSAT surveys tell you where a specific experience fell short.
Most insurance leadership teams have gotten good at measuring that gap. Far fewer have built a real process for closing it — scores get reported up, reviewed, and handed to managers, but rarely turn into a change a policyholder would notice. That’s the real opportunity: not more just measurement, but more action.
Where the insurance industry stands on NPS
Let’s start with the baseline number: the average NPS score across the insurance industry is 35, according to CustomerGauge’s benchmarks database, which tracks scores from 25 major carriers (source). That average masks a wide variation across the industry. Auto insurance averages around 41. Health insurance trails at 27. Individual carriers span an enormous range, from Allianz at 79 down to carriers sitting in single digits or negative territory.
| Insurance Carrier | NPS Score |
| Allianz | 79 |
| USAA | 75 |
| Cigna | 70 |
| Allstate | 59 |
| Nationwide | 43 |
| UnitedHealth | 42 |
| Liberty Mutual | 10 |
| Source: CustomerGauge Insurance NPS Benchmarks |
The more useful question isn’t where a competitor’s score sits, it’s what they’re doing to move it.
There’s momentum to work with here, too. Forrester’s 2026 Total Experience research found that auto and home insurance carriers posted the biggest year-over-year improvement of any industry in the U.S. and Canada, increasing their average score by 4.5 points, according to CMSWire’s analysis of the rankings (source). The industry is climbing. The carriers pulling ahead are the ones treating feedback as an input to decisions, not a report card
What “moving the needle” looks like for insurance carriers
Score improvement in insurance rarely comes from one big swing. It comes from a handful of deliberate moves, repeated consistently.
Close the loop fast, every time. In Singapore, AIG reclaimed the top spot in Forrester’s regional insurance CX Index after a multi-year push. The company credited its progress to consistently seeking feedback across every touchpoint and following up on it through a disciplined process (source). The biggest driver was a consistent habit of listening and following up that never lapsed.
Put the data where decisions happen. Aegon rolled its voice-of-customer program out across 47 departments, using it to flag issues to frontline staff and track root causes as they emerged, rather than keeping that intelligence stuck in a quarterly leadership deck. Key insights went to the people who could act on it immediately.
Use feedback to justify the next investment, not just report on the last one. Nationwide has leaned into digital claims tracking, text-based updates, and faster digital payments, and its Chief Customer Officer has pointed directly to customer feedback as the driver behind those investments (source). The feedback loop didn’t stop at “here’s our score.” It fed the roadmap.
Give frontline teams the feedback, not just the summary. Kaiser Permanente has topped health plan satisfaction rankings for over a decade by pairing customer-centric tools with an employee empowerment model, giving support staff room to resolve issues without waiting on layers of process. This lesson applies well beyond healthcare: the closer feedback gets to the person who can fix the problem, the faster the score moves.
None of these carriers won by finding a clever new survey question. They won by shortening the distance between “a customer told us something” and “someone changed something.”
The real bottleneck: stuck between looking and acting
Here’s where most leadership conversations actually stall. Feedback only creates value once it reaches the people who can act on it — and in most carriers, it doesn’t. Claims handlers, support reps, and executives are often working off separate views of the same customer, so nobody catches a bad claims call or a stalled complaint in time to fix it. The carriers that hold onto customers are the ones that respond while there’s still a relationship left to save.
This is a gap in a lot of organizations today. Feedback gets collected, looked at, and it gets handed to managers, but it never gets wired into a workflow that actually triggers action.
There’s also a more basic, more fixable problem sitting underneath the strategic one: getting enough feedback in the first place. Timing is one of the biggest levers here. Feedback collected close to the moment of interaction, an SMS or QR-based survey right after a claim or service call, can produce double-digit response rates. Speed isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s one of the strongest predictors of whether you hear from customers at all.
If your team is manually building and sending survey batches, and it takes the better part of a week to get them out the door, you’re not just running slow, you’re missing the response rates that drive a healthier NPS and CSAT program.
Where automation fits into the leadership conversation
This is exactly the kind of problem worth bringing to IT as a resourcing conversation, not just a CX one. Automated, trigger-based survey workflows — ones that fire the moment a claim closes, or a service call ends — remove the manual lag that’s currently costing response volume. It’s a smaller ask than it sounds: a defined workflow, tied to systems you already have, that takes the survey send out of a person’s inbox entirely.
Alchemer Connect is purpose-built for exactly this. It connects feedback triggers to the moments that matter, routes responses instantly to the right team, and closes the loop without someone manually managing the process end to end. For a leadership team weighing where to invest scarce IT resources, this is a concrete, scoped ask with a clear payoff: faster response rates, fresher signal, and a program that scales without adding headcount.
Turning benchmarks into a strategy
Industry averages and competitor scores are a useful gut check, but they’re not a strategy on their own. The insurers pulling ahead are pairing that outside view with a tighter internal loop: feedback that reaches the right team fast, and a workflow that doesn’t depend on someone remembering to hit send.
If your leadership team is having the same conversation — how do we actually use this data — we’d love to help. Let’s talk before your next planning cycle. Request a demo to walk through your goals with our team.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a “good” NPS score in insurance?
Anything above the NPS industry average of 35 is solid footing, but “good” depends on what you’re comparing against. A regional auto carrier competing against USAA or Allianz is playing a different game than a specialty health plan competing against peers averaging in the 20s and 30s. The more useful benchmark is usually your own score, tracked over time, alongside two or three named competitors you actually lose customers to.
Should we prioritize NPS or CSAT?
They answer different questions, so most carriers end up tracking both. NPS is a loyalty signal — it tells you whether a policyholder would vouch for you to someone else. CSAT is a moment-in-time reaction to a specific interaction, like a claims call or a renewal conversation. NPS tells you if you have a retention problem. CSAT tells you where in the journey that problem is coming from.
How often should we be surveying policyholders?
Tie your surveys to real moments in their journey rather than a fixed calendar. The interactions that shape loyalty most in insurance are claims, renewals, and any call into customer service — so those are the events worth triggering a CSAT or NPS survey around. Alchemer’s Survey Invite Channels capability makes this easier to act on: instead of building a separate survey process for every channel, you create one invitation and Alchemer delivers it wherever a policyholder already communicates, whether that’s SMS, email, WhatsApp, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or straight through a tool like Zendesk or Salesforce. A claim closes, the invitation goes out automatically through the right channel, and the response routes back into the systems your team already works from — no one has to remember to hit send.
Is it worth benchmarking against a specific competitor, or just the industry average?
Both, for different reasons. The industry average tells you if you’re structurally behind or ahead. A specific competitor’s score tells your leadership team something more persuasive: here’s a company policyholders are comparing us to directly, and here’s roughly where they stand. That second framing tends to move budget conversations faster than an abstract average.
Does claims experience really move NPS and CSAT that much?
In insurance, yes, more than almost any other touchpoint. Most policyholders have little regular contact with their carrier outside of billing, so a claim is often the first real test of the relationship. A slow, confusing, or poorly communicated claims process shows up directly in both scores, and it’s usually the fastest place to find an improvement opportunity if your scores have stalled.
What should we actually do with a low NPS or CSAT response, beyond noting it?
A fast, direct follow-up on a bad claims experience or a frustrating renewal call can recover the relationship and gives your team a clear, specific example of what to fix upstream. Alchemer Connect can trigger that follow-up automatically the moment a detractor score comes in, and route it to a manager with the context attached, rather than waiting for someone to spot it in a spreadsheet.
We get hundreds of open-text comments on every survey. How do we make sense of all of it?
Manually reading and tagging that volume of comments can take hours of a CX or ops team’s week. Alchemer Pulse analyzes open-text feedback at scale and surfaces the themes underneath it — confusing claims language, slow callback times, agent tone — so your team spends its time acting on patterns instead of reading one comment at a time.