Customer Impact Survey
Prudential is dedicated to ensuring your needs are at the heart of our business, which is why we actively chose to take part in the yearly Association of British Insurers Customer Impact Survey. This forms part of our overall commitment to improving the way we deal with our customers.
This survey, which has been running since 2007, is part of the independently run Customer Impact Scheme. It provides an extensive, and unbiased, measure of how well financial services customers believe they're being treated by the pensions, protection and investment industry.
We're one of 35 companies that took part in the survey. 20,694 financial services customers were asked for their views. Of this, we interviewed 747 Prudential customers in September and October 2009, including people who had recently bought from us or made a claim.
How did we do?
From an economic perspective, it was one of the most volatile years on record. Despite improvements in consumer confidence and market gains in 2009, it's perhaps unsurprising that the 2009/10 Customer Impact Survey saw scores for the industry fall sharply this year; especially for return on investment and industry reputation.
This theme has influenced our results and, while the vast majority of our scores are in line with the industry average as shown below, we've seen very little movement from the scores we achieved last year. This shows that, like all organisations, there are still areas where we need to improve.
Customer Commitments
As part of the scheme , we made three key commitments to ensure that the needs of our customers are at the core of the way we run our business.
As you can see, there's a slight decrease compared to 2009, which is disappointing. We're always looking to enhance the options we provide and are continuing to invest in developments with a view to constantly improving the services we offer.
We're concerned that there has been a fall in 2010 and are actively talking to our customers, like you, to see how we can improve our communications further.
Compared to 2009, we've seen a slight decrease but are in line with the rest of the industry. We're reviewing our post sale service offerings to see what changes can be made to make it easier for our customers.
Our three customer commitments have all experienced declines over the past year but are in line with the industry and frequently above our industry peers. It should be noted these graphs only show "very good" and "excellent" scores. On all three Customer Commitments at least another 35% of customers rate us as "good".
Continuing to treat our customers fairly
Barry O'Dwyer, Deputy Chief Executive, Prudential UK
"One of my responsibilities is to chair our Customer Management Forum. This is a key opportunity for our most senior managers to review regularly what our customers are telling us.
We are pleased to see that nearly 9 out of 10 customers feel we treat them fairly while the Customer Impact scores reported here show that we have achieved a steady performance in very challenging market conditions. There is clearly still room for improvement, however. We have therefore put in place a programme of initiatives in key areas - from improving our offerings and service to simplifying customer literature and reducing policy set-up times.
I'm pleased that we are beginning to see this focus deliver very positive results. For example, there has been a significant increase in the number of customers rating us as "excellent" or "very good" for the time taken to transfer their Prudential pension into an annuity - now 64%. This transfer can be a complex process and with millions of pension customers, you can see how important it is that we get it right."
