The Study of Service Recovery Strategies for Orphan Policyholders

• Main Authors: Yeh, Shih-Min, 葉詩旻
• Other Authors: Chang, Aihwa
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95849208240378072624

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 風險管理與保險研究所 === 92 === Life insurers need to be concerned about issues related to orphan policyholders in order to manage them well. Evidence shows that there is a widespread orphan policyholder’s in life insurance industry. They also have many negative influences on insurers, such as increasing their rate of lapse, weakening the insurer/orphan relationships, etc. This study proposes suitable service recovery strategies for orphans to managers. It examines relationships among service failures towards orphans, service recovery strategies and customers’ behaviors in Taiwan’s life insurance market. Customers’ behaviors include secondary satisfaction, word-of-mouth (W-O-M) and repurchase intentions. The research methods include in-depth interviews and surveys. The first step is an exploratory study of the theme of orphan policies by conducting in-depth interviews with both managers and orphans. The results of the in-depth interviews consider the sources for developing and designing a survey. The survey is the second step, and is the focus of this research. There were 418 questionnaires sent out and responses for received from 289 of these. Of these 289 questionnaires, 230 were completed by eligible respondents, and 225 of the 230 questionnaires were valid. The limits of this study are non-random samplings with insufficient sample sizes. The findings show below: 1. Orphans’ experiences There are 14.3﹪respondents that claim they are no longer orphans. Only 4.2% of the respondents declare that they have been orphans for less than a year. This reveals that insurers do not regard policyholders becoming orphans to be an urgent service failure. The majority of respondents rarely received services from their agents and if so, the services were of poor quality. 2. Failure attribution and severity The majority of respondents hold the agents’ responsible for service failures (67.7%) and consider failure severity to be serious（43.0﹪）. In addition, 63.4% of orphans whose assigned agents never kept contact with them after their original agents left thought that is a serious service failure. 3. Orphans’ behavior responses Over 60% of respondents show dissatisfaction with the service recovery from insurers and agents. W-O-M behaviors of respondents show a negative 64% and a positive 12.9%. Repurchase intentions of respondents show a negative 69.8% and a positive 16.4%. 4. Expected service recovery of orphan policyholders The first 3 highest expectations of orphans are that 1) The agent must make a clear description of rights and responsibilities of the policy that an orphan holds, 2) Offer options that are beneficial to orphans while willing to cancel the policy, and 3) The ability for the insured to have the right to choose an agent who is a better fit without restrictions. The first two lowest expectations of orphans are 1) Agents who work for competitors are willing to listen and show their concerns, and 2) Agents who work for competitors are willing to offer assistance in need.” To compare the names of service recovery that are reasoned by literature review to those that are given by factor analysis show that the former names tend to be distinguished by recovery action, the latter ones are related to subjects who offer service. 5. The result of hypothesis testing a. Orphans who have service needs consider service failure more serious than those who don’t have service needs. b. Factors that affect expected service recovery Orphans consider service failure more crucial, they expect a higher degree of service recovery and more actions of service recovery. c. Factors that affect the secondary satisfaction The gaps between expected and practical service recovery have significant influences on the secondary satisfaction. The bigger the gaps are, the lower an orphan’s secondary satisfaction tends to be. The gaps have more influence than failure severity on the secondary satisfaction. Besides, the gaps also have more influence than the difference of failure attribution on the secondary satisfaction. d. Factors that affect orphans’ W-O-M behaviors The secondary satisfaction has a great influence on an orphan’s W-O-M behavior. The lower secondary satisfaction, the more negative the W-O-M behavior. The gaps between expected and practical service recovery are more influential than the differences in the failure of attribution on orphans’ W-O-M behaviors. e. Factors that affect orphans’ repurchase intentions The secondary satisfaction greatly influences on an orphan’s repurchase intentions. The lower the secondary satisfaction is the greater the decrease in repurchase intentions. The gaps between expected and practical service recovery are more influential than the difference of failure attribution on orphans’ repurchase intentions. 6. Effective strategies of service recovery for orphan policyholders In order to enhance secondary satisfaction for policyholders, life insurers have to devote themselves to service correction and improvement of the agents’ complaint-handling skills. Evidence shows that the factors of service correction and agents’ excellent complaint-handling skills have significant effects on the secondary satisfaction. Thus, the factors of service correction and agents’ excellent complaint-handling skills are the most effective strategies of service recovery for orphan policyholders.