A general insurance customer experiences their insurer as a single, continuous relationship. Most insurers manage that same relationship as a series of separate properties: a marketing site, a quote funnel, a members area, a claims operation. This paper examines what happens in the gaps between them.

Drawing on three Global Reviews research programmes across North American general insurance markets, including an observed research journey with 300 in-market Canadian customers, a benchmark of public-site acquisition journeys across eight brands built on 1,236 participants, and a logged-in servicing benchmark built on 840 participants, the findings cover the full journey from first search to renewal.

The central conclusion: digital capability at any single touchpoint no longer separates insurers. What distinguishes the strongest experiences is continuity.

‍

Discover: customers arrive ready to transact

The idea of a leisurely research phase does not survive contact with the evidence. Most insurance shoppers arrive at a provider's site with a job to do, and the job is usually a quote. Customers chose the provider's website ahead of every alternative at every single task, from researching brands at 44% through getting a quote at 58% to managing an account at 65%.

Beneath the averages sit two distinct mindsets. Self-directed buyers research quickly, go straight to quotes, and value flexible payment and easy claims. Reassurance-seekers research longer and want a human to confirm their understanding before committing, with 85% of phone-preferring customers wanting advice from a licensed expert. The critical point is that both mindsets use the same front door. Among customers who intend to sign up by phone, more than half prefer the website for every task up to and including the quote itself.

How a customer converts also shapes what they cost to serve. 91% of customers who sign up online say they would also manage their account online, against 63% of phone sign-ups. That 28-point difference compounds over every interaction of the relationship.

Bundling is where the biggest opportunity sits, and where the biggest misconception blocks it. 51% of 35 to 49 year-olds who do not bundle believe individual policies from separate providers are cheaper, and a quarter say switching would take too much effort. Both are directly addressable on the public site with quantified savings and switching support, yet both routinely go unaddressed. Canadian providers under-deliver against expectations on nine of eleven multipolicy attributes, with the largest gaps on loyalty rewards and having a dedicated advisor.

‍

Convert: the quote is the shop window

Between roughly four and eight in ten task participants began their journey by opening a quote rather than reading about the product. Content that lives only on browse pages is content most prospects never see. The quote journey must therefore do the work that marketing pages were designed to do: communicate value, answer questions, and build confidence, all while collecting data.

The strongest journeys anchor savings at the start and sustain the message through to the result. On the statement that the provider gave good reasons to choose them during the quote, mobile scores ranged from 6.0 to 8.1 out of 10 across the eight brands benchmarked, and the leaders were precisely the brands that surface savings, social proof, and discount stacking inside the journey rather than on pages customers skip.

Quote form design is where good intentions go to die. The best performers set clear expectations at the start, keep progress signals honest, chunk questions into small labelled steps, pre-fill what public data can supply, and keep everything editable so a mistake never means starting again. Misaligned progress bars and surprise extra steps did real damage in testing. The two largest gaps between importance and delivered performance in the acquisition research were switching handled by the provider and renewal-date alignment, exactly the practical questions customers arrive with and most brands fail to answer.

The quote journey is also the market's most natural cross-sell moment, when handled as a courtesy rather than a pitch. Being a current customer is worth minus 10 points as a driver of multipolicy choice, meaning loyalty does not sell itself. The brands that grow relationships inside the quote greet returning customers, pre-fill their details, and show a loyalty discount. The brands that do not hand them an empty form.

‍

Retain: easy to start is not the same as easy to finish

Across nine core servicing tasks tested on eight brands, most made tasks easy to begin, with usability scores frequently in the 80s and 90s. The gaps appear at the finish. Three patterns recur: a divide between viewing and doing, where policy screens display information without offering the obvious next action; missing depth exactly where customers care most, with feature provision thinnest in the categories customers rank highest; and an industry-wide retreat on mobile web, where every one of the eight brands offered fewer features on its mobile site than in its app.

The single most desired servicing capability in the study was making a claim online, rated 9.13 out of 10. It was still unavailable on some brands' websites, with journeys ending in a phone number.

Claims is the moment that decides the relationship. Customers approach it anxious, and the design response the benchmark surfaced is preparation and pace. Stronger claims experiences surface what-to-expect content and should-I-file triage before the form begins, then open with fast single-select steps that build momentum. Participants who used these flows described a task they had dreaded as not stressful and so much easier. Those who encountered an experience that looked self-serve but required a phone call at the end described it as a fundamental betrayal of the promise.

Personalisation is the most underused lever in the retained relationship. Customers are strikingly open to it, including when it involves relevant selling. 71% respond positively to their insurer highlighting coverage gaps, with just 3% negative. Yet most insurers stop at surface-level recognition. A 44-year customer of one brand, asked what felt personalised about her experience, said: "I've got my name on it, but there's like nothing that's personalised other than my information."

The moment personalisation matters most is renewal. In an environment of rising premiums, 62% of customers said a clear explanation of why their price changed would make them more likely to stay, nearly double any other lever. Easy ways to adjust cover and transparent comparison of current versus alternative options follow. Retention, the evidence suggests, is less about defending a price than about being seen to be on the customer's side while explaining it.

Chat was the weakest task in the entire servicing benchmark, with ease scores ranging from 4.1 to 7.7 out of 10 across all eight brands. The cause is not that customers dislike chat. It is that large language models have reset what a bot means, and insurer chatbots have not kept pace. Participants were not comparing insurance webchat to banking webchat. They were comparing it to ChatGPT.

‍

One journey, one memory

Customers do not experience an acquisition funnel, a quote engine, and a members portal. They experience an insurer, and they carry impressions across boundaries insurers treat as separate. The discount that persuaded them to switch sets the expectation that value will stay visible after login. The ease of the quote sets the bar for the ease of the claim. The market is competent within each stage and weakest at the seams. Each seam generates a call, a doubt, or a quiet decision to shop around at renewal.

Download the full whitepaper for brand-level findings across all three research programmes, detailed acquisition and servicing benchmarks, and a complete set of priority actions for each stage of the customer journey.

‍