# 9 Ways Insurance Leaders Champion Customer-Centricity and Drive Cultural Shifts - Published: 2026-11-06 - Author: [Insurance News](https://insurancenews.io/author/insurancenews-io.md) - Topics: [Q&A](https://insurancenews.io/qa.md) - Source: https://insurancenews.io/qa/9-ways-insurance-leaders-champion-customer-centricity-and-drive-cultural-shifts/ - Publication: Insurance News - Publisher: Connectively (Terkel, Inc.) - Editorial policy: https://insurancenews.io/editorial-policy/ - AI use: The perspectives in this article were written by the named contributors and submitted through Connectively. Connectively's automated system selected them and used AI to write the headline, introduction, section headings, summary sections, and illustration, and to make minor edits for clarity. Articles are assembled and published automatically. Report errors to corrections@connectively.us. ### Invite Clients to Review Policies It's easy to get lost behind a computer, analyzing everything through metrics, but it's essential to step away from the screen and listen to customers. One way we've done that is by inviting customers to the office to review policies. This helps us build relationships and helps customers ensure they have the coverage they need. Building trust through in-person communication has helped shift the culture to one centered around the customer. --- ### Send Handwritten Notes After Complaints The cultural shift I had to create was getting everyone to treat a customer problem as the start of a relationship, not a ticket to close. Early on, our team measured success by how fast an issue disappeared. Customers were satisfied but forgettable. What changed it was a simple habit: after any issue that mattered to a customer, someone on the team sends a short handwritten note, saying what went wrong and what we learned. It takes two minutes and it is signed by a real person. The effect on customers was obvious, because almost nobody expects ink and paper after a complaint. The effect on our team was bigger. They started noticing the human side of each case, because you cannot write a sincere note about a customer you did not actually listen to. For anyone in insurance, where customers often only hear from you at renewal or claims, I think this applies even more. Customer-centricity is not a slogan on a wall. It is a small, repeatable gesture that proves someone paid attention, and leaders have to model it first by writing the first few notes themselves. --- ### Curate Fewer Insurance Choices The clearest way we put the customer first at Eprezto was by showing them fewer insurance options, not more. We are a digital broker in Panama, so part of our job is letting people compare carriers. The natural instinct in this business is to connect as many insurers as you can and present everything. We used to show eight. We cut that to between four and five, because a customer who is buying car insurance on their phone does not want a spreadsheet. They want help deciding. The cultural shift was internal. We had to stop thinking of ourselves as an aggregator whose value is the length of the list, and start acting like a recommender whose value is a good, fast decision for the customer. That changes how you judge a new carrier: not "does it add another row," but "does it make the choice better for the person on the other side." There was an operational benefit too, which helped the team buy in. Every carrier connects to us differently, with its own API quirks and its own maintenance. Fewer carriers meant fewer programmers tied up just keeping integrations alive. My advice to other insurance leaders: look at where your process makes the customer do work you could do for them, and take that work off their plate. --- ### Measure Resolution Sentiment To drive customer-centricity in the insurance industry, organizations must change their operational priorities from average handle time to resolution sentiment. As I have worked with insurance and healthcare customers for years, I have seen that sticking to operating with a hard focus on processing speed may lead to loss of trust in the policy. To solve this problem, I initiated a transition from working as data processors to acting as advocates for the customer among the frontline workers of the organization. The key cultural transformation aimed at overcoming the efficiency dilemma, as agents often moved quickly through the calls in order to achieve the targets on their performance. The practices aimed at changing the indicators of performance from the efficiency of the first call and its emotional outcome were difficult to implement due to their challenging the long-standing view of support as a cost center. As a result, we needed to convince the management and agents that speaking with the customers for a bit longer will actually eliminate the need to contact the service representatives multiple times. Technology supported our efforts to carry out this transformation. Instead of acting as an obstacle, technology empowered us in implementing our plans. By automating the tasks related to performing data entry, we provided our employees with an opportunity to listen to claimants properly. Technology might have been applied in data processing, while human agents offered their emotional involvement to the interaction. --- ### Answer Questions First What I can say about us is that we moved from asking how timely the report was to asking if they were answered. All the reports begin with a two line summary answer to their last question. This was not an easy change to make. It took some time to get into the habit of answering the question rather than doing the report. The initial few weeks didn't have very detailed answers so I began writing some examples. Not 100% sure they do when I am not there. --- ### Empower Frontline Teams to Act I made customer feedback the engine of our product and operations decisions. We stopped treating support as a cost center and gave frontline teams the authority to change listings, tweak sizing notes and pause products when complaints rose, so fixes happen in hours not weeks. Creating that required a cultural shift from defending internal assumptions to treating customer signals as design input. I hired people with shop-floor empathy, rewarded quick corrective action, and made post-purchase feedback a daily agenda item in ops meetings. --- ### Search Like Prospects Do 1\. I got the team to look for us in the same way that customers do: not in our own analytics, but in Google, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini searches with memory turned off. So I typed "best \[service\] in \[area\]" into Google and found 89 different sites were cited in 28 different answers, with two of the directories even showing up more than most businesses' own sites. A very small sample size, but all one day's work. A major shift in perspective for most internal people, and it immediately changed the way that everyone on the team talked about finding customers. For example, right now, you could find out how customers describe travel insurance in your city by searching for "best travel insurance for families in \[your city\]". The results on the first page of results include exactly what you'd read had you gone to the site of that insurer. 2\. Change from describing yourself and your services in the words of your team to describing yourself and your services in the words of your customers. Instead of referring to your plans as "Tiers", "Products" and "Comprehensive Coverage", your customers want to know what it is that you are covering them for, how much it's going to cost them, and who they can speak with in order to sort out any problems that may arise in the future. I created the core pages for RankAISearch to detail the core information that customers would want to read. In essence, I wanted the four core elements to be clearly visible on the first part of every page: Who we are / What we offer / Where we are / What proofs / etc that back up what we say we do. Measure first. Then change one thing. Document it. Wait a day or two to see if what you did had any positive impact on your customers before redesigning the rest of the site based on your gut feeling of what you think they "need". --- ### Clarify Benefits Before Sales I've been a proponent of customer-centricity, in part by encouraging a change in the insurance industry from simply selling insurance coverage to helping people understand the protection they are actually buying. The cheapest plan is not always the right plan in terms of employee benefits. Employees need to understand deductibles, provider networks, prescription coverage, and what they may owe out of pocket. The cultural change is no longer "What plan can we sell you?" but "Will this plan work when someone actually needs healthcare?" It means listening more carefully to both employers and employees, demystifying complicated insurance terms into easy-to-understand language, and looking beyond the first premium when comparing options. My advice to other insurance leaders is to measure success by whether customers understand their coverage and can use it with confidence, not just by whether a policy has been sold. --- ### Log Every Client Change Request For a trucking company, a delay on a policy change isn't a small inconvenience. A missing driver or truck on the policy can keep a load from moving. So the most customer-centric thing we did was make sure no client request could get lost. Requests used to arrive every possible way: calls, texts, messaging apps, email. Our team cared, but a request sitting in one person's chat had no owner and no deadline. We set one rule: every policy-change request goes into a single channel, where it becomes a tracked task with a named owner and a due date. If a client calls or texts, the team member forwards it there right away. The cultural shift was moving from "I'll remember" to "if it isn't in the system, it doesn't exist." That felt rigid to some people at first. But once everyone could see what was waiting and who owned it, clients stopped having to chase us, and that is what customer-centric actually means. Zebo Karim, Founder, Get Logan, a trucking insurance agency ## Related - [How Do You Maintain Team Culture and Morale During a Work Model Shift?](https://insurancenews.io/qa/how-do-you-maintain-team-culture-and-morale-during-a-work-model-shift.md) - [8 Digital Skills Insurance Teams Should Prioritize and How to Train for Them](https://insurancenews.io/qa/8-digital-skills-insurance-teams-should-prioritize-and-how-to-train-for-them.md) - [7 Decisions Insurance Leaders Made to Prepare for Future Disruption](https://insurancenews.io/qa/7-decisions-insurance-leaders-made-to-prepare-for-future-disruption.md) - [How Insurance Leaders Build Trust During Coverage Changes](https://insurancenews.io/qa/how-insurance-leaders-build-trust-during-coverage-changes.md)