The conventional wisdom is that the customer is king. They can wield a great deal of power, so what they say and think about your product is very important. A positive reputation among customers can definitely drive business to you.  I got the opportunity to see the power of a positive reputation in action when I recently took a cruise to the Caribbean. On one of our stops, instead of booking an excursion through the cruise line, we elected to find and book one on our own. We were looking for a better and cheaper experience than what the cruise line was offering.

Once we were on shore and found the tour we booked, I took an informal survey among everyone in the group.  I found they had all relied upon travel site reviews in order to make the decision to book this particular off-ship excursion. Everyone found the reviews from consumers that described the actual experience to be the most helpful. The vast majority of the hundreds of reviews for this particular excursion company were positive and complimentary, and set realistic expectations.  A great mix when you are trying to book an excursion in a country you’ve never been to and want to feel comfortable with the decision.

In trying to find similar reviews of life insurance companies, I’ve discovered that there aren’t many good sources, and the ones I could find, I wouldn’t consider any to be a definitive or primary source to use as a guide. Most of the easy to find sites out there featured reviews that were highly negative, and carried a lot of emotional weight without much in the way of substance or context. I looked at the web sites for the major life insurers and didn’t find any with a link to an outside source for consumer reviews, which was a feature that the excursion company prominently highlighted and encouraged prospective customers to use. The idea of strength is a big talking point for life insurance companies. Usually, they are talking about financial strength, but what about strength from the point of view of the customer, or policyholder? The current situation is not very helpful for someone looking at life insurance and is used to finding lots of consumer reviews to help guide the decision.

Someone has to get the ball rolling for the life insurance industry, and if it’s not pulled, perhaps it can be pushed. There would be some challenges to overcome for a life insurer to make use of this type of consumer-driven tool. First, would be to find a site that is suitably unbiased and that provides a legitimate forum for discussion. Unlike many other industries, there isn’t a review site that’s gained traction yet for the life insurance industry.  It would be tough to pick a platform without the ability to affect it, but it doesn’t do any good to have reviews if they aren’t taken seriously. The second challenge would be to get their customers to proactively write about their experiences on that site. Third, is to make the review site easily found by current and prospective customers. Checking for reviews is becoming the norm, even for little purchases. Life insurance is a serious purchase and too many consumers will continue to avoid buying it without some way to gauge the experiences of real people.

Is taking advantage of the consumers’ positive opinions impossible? No

Is it difficult? Yes.

Is the task worthwhile? Absolutely.