Speaking on a panel debate at the annual Protection Review in central London last week, Jo Causon, chief executive of the Institute of Customer Service, said numerous surveys had shown that trust could be gained by ramping up customer service.
She said consumers were putting value over price and sustainability over disposability, and that this represented an opportunity for the protection industry to gain new ground and rebuild trust.
Ms Causon also warned that although customer satisfaction in the service industries has increased in the past five years, it had started to dip and in the last 12 months had started to fall – a trend likely to continue.
She said: “The industry needs to collaborate and its dealings need to be open and transparent.”
Discussing the matter of trust and ethics, Professor Paul Palmer of the Cass Business School told the panel discussion that the model of the local bank manager who knew all of his clients and felt able to offer them personal financial advice, was still one to be emulated.
Tomasz Krzewina, the new business origination manager at Swiss Re, said the lessons of the growth of the peer-to-peer model of lending and financing, was one from which the protection industry could learn. He said the P2P model made him, as a consumer, feel part of community in that he felt part of “something bigger”, and called the experience an “emotionally rewarding one”.
