During the buying journey, they compare products, weigh up cover options and price, and read reviews. And in some cases, they may speak to an adviser. Eventually they make a decision based on the confidence they have in the promise being made to them.
Buying insurance is ultimately an act of trust. Customers leave the purchase with an expectation of what will happen if they ever need to make a claim. And that expectation is shaped by the entire buying experience, not just the policy wording.
But trust isn’t secured at the point of sale, it’s tested at the point of claim, when the promise either holds or breaks.
Setting high expectations at purchase can cost insurers the customer if they fail to meet them at claim. Customer trust in insurers is twice as high during purchase as it is at claim (The Trust Gap Report: General Insurance, 2026).
When a customer makes a claim – whether that’s months or years after buying a policy – they bring an expectation with them. They ask themselves: ‘Is this what I thought would happen?’
If the answer is yes, trust is reinforced. If the answer is no, the claims experience starts from disappointment, regardless of how well it’s managed.
By the time the customer reaches the claims team, the expectation already exists. And that creates a problem for insurers. Because the claims team can deliver a technically correct outcome and still leave a customer feeling that the promise has been broken.
Imagine a customer who believes their insurer will make a difficult situation straightforward. Then they need to claim and discover a process they find confusing, lengthy or difficult to navigate.
Trust is emotional as well as operational. Customers judge the experience against the confidence they had when they bought the policy. If the reality falls short of that expectation, the claims journey starts with a trust deficit. And that deficit can be difficult to recover from. Almost 1 in 2 customers consider switching insurer after a disappointing claim (The Trust Gap Report: General Insurance 2026)
The FCA has highlighted the importance of managing customer expectations throughout claims journeys, including through timely and appropriate communication. Its reviews have also identified issues such as complex claims processes, delays and communications that are not sufficiently tailored to customers.
These are operational issues, but they’re experienced emotionally by the customer. A delay can feel like they’re being ignored, and a lack of clarity can feel like they’re being kept in the dark.
The resolution is to design the claims experience around the expectations customers already have, not just the process insurers need to deliver. That means identifying where uncertainty, confusion and frustration are likely to appear, then designing communication and support to address them before they become trust issues.
Many insurers measure the purchase experience and claims experience separately. But the customer doesn't.
For them, there’s one relationship with one insurer. And the promise made at purchase connects directly to the experience delivered at a claim.
Yet organisations can end up optimising each stage independently: improving conversion at purchase, reducing handling time in claims, and monitoring satisfaction after service.
Each metric may look healthy in isolation, but the overall experience can still feel incoherent. Because if you only measure what happens during a claim, you can identify where the process is failing. But you may miss the reason the customer is disappointed in the first place.
The expectation was set somewhere else. That means the root cause may sit outside the claims journey entirely.
The resolution is to connect the data, measures and design of the purchase and claims experiences. That means looking at what customers were told, what they understood, what they expected and what they ultimately experienced. That creates a much clearer view of where trust starts to diverge.
For insurers, this means treating the purchase and claims experience as one continuous promise.
Start by understanding what customers believe they have bought before they ever need to use it. Identify the moments that shape those expectations, from product information and marketing through to sales conversations and policy communications.
That means connecting the purchase, service and claims journeys rather than treating them as separate experiences.
Most importantly, it means measuring trust across the relationship and knowing:
Those are the moments worth designing around.
The promise made at purchase, and the experience delivered at claim aren’t two separate moments, they’re one continuous thread. Understanding where that promise is set, where it’s reinforced, and where it begins to break down means bringing together customer feedback, emotional insight and operational data, not simply what happened, but why trust was strengthened or weakened at each point along the way.
That combination gives a clearer picture of where the promise holds and where it breaks, and it can reveal a very different set of priorities than looking at claim data alone.
Perhaps the biggest trust issue isn't the claims process itself, but the expectation created during purchase. Or perhaps customers understand what’s covered, but not what the claims process will actually feel like. Or maybe a particular communication creates confidence at one stage of the journey and undermines it at another. Or maybe the operational process is working well, but the emotional experience is falling short.
These insights give insurers somewhere specific to act. They can identify which moments need redesign, where communication needs to change, which expectations need to be reset and where investment in the claims process will have the greatest impact on trust.
That’s the difference between measuring a claims journey and understanding the relationship around it.
A well-designed claims journey matters. But so does the promise that leads the customer into it. And when those two things align, not only does the customer experience a well-managed claim; they experience evidence that their decision to trust the insurer was the right one.
If you want to understand where trust is being built, challenged or lost across your insurance customer journey, we can help.
A CX Trust Audit® identifies where the promise you make at purchase is being kept, tested or broken across your insurance customer journey, and the opportunities to strengthen it.