How to build trust for your insurance company regardless of what people think of the industry 

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3 keywords we need to align on 

Trust

I define trust as the level, or gauge, of safety, comfort, and fear you feel toward someone or something, based on how you perceive them or what they've done in the past. That gauge is what tells you whether you can rely on them. When safety and comfort are high, and fear is low, you find it easy to rely on someone, regardless of the risk involved. But when safety and comfort are low, and fear is high, you walk away, no matter what else is true. 

Reputation

Reputation is simply what people think about you, your company, or your industry. Given that the industry's existing reputation is currently working against you, you can reshape your own company's reputation by reshaping the experience of the people already doing business with you. Your existing policyholders are already experiencing your company directly, and what they go on to tell others depends on whether that experience builds or threatens their trust in your company. 

Loyalty

I define loyalty as the willingness of your policyholders to keep renewing with you, and to tell others to choose you too. Strip away the insurance context, and loyalty is simply the willingness of someone to keep choosing a business, and to recommend it to others. 

How do you build trust for your insurance company regardless of what people think about the industry as a whole?  

Start by CONSISTENTLY creating experiences that make policyholders trust your insurance company.

Customer experience is simply how people feel about you, based on every interaction they have with your team, your website, your social media, your processes. Experiences shape how policyholders perceive your insurance company, and that feeling, that impression, is what they carry forward. That's what they base their opinion on, which means their word of mouth is based on it too.

Recall that trust is the gauge of comfort, safety, and fear that a policyholder or potential one feels towards your brand, based on what you've done previously or how they perceive the company in the moment.

The experiences you create for customers can either add to building trust or help to shatter it. Being intentional about the experience you create for policyholders is what helps them trust you. When they trust you, they keep choosing your insurance company (loyalty), and they confidently spread positive words about your insurance company, their word of mouth helps to reshape your reputation into a beneficial one. 

How to consistently create experiences that build trust 

Build an intentional culture

The most common way to fail at building a great experience is starting at the customer-facing layer, better adverts, a more polished social media presence, a friendlier call centre team to calm angry customers down. These are surface-level fixes, they're the tip of the iceberg. 

What actually creates an experience customers can trust is a culture that supports it. That means going below the surface, and it's not a comfortable place to work from, which is exactly why most leaders avoid it. 

What is culture?

Culture is simply your beliefs and behaviours: your mindset, your mental models, your daily decisions and actions. If you believe, for eaxmple, that call centre agents are replaceable and don't deserve real investment, you won't invest much in that department, and they will treat every call as a task to close, not a relationship that's worth protecting. This will, in turn, create bad experiences for policyholders, and you know how the rest will play out.

It doesn't matter how good your adverts, website, or call centre scripts are. If a customer feels safe and confident engaging with your brand online, only to feel the opposite the moment they interact with your team, they don't just leave neutral. They leave with a deeper distrust of the entire industry, because now they've had a real experience to confirm what they already suspected.

You'll always have a culture whether you build one or not 

Many leaders, when they hear how difficult building a real culture is, decide to postpone it. "Let's leave the culture work for next year." The problem is that you don't get to choose whether to have a culture or not. You already have one, because it's your beliefs and behaviours, your way of doing things.

If you don't intentionally choose how you do things, if you default to whatever's easiest and never question the impact of your actions on customer perception, don't be surprised when people say they don't trust your company.

This gets harder in organisations run by more than one person. Every employee comes with habits and instincts formed at other companies. Some will try to match your way of doing things, but will still retain previous culture traits. If you don't intentionally shape how people behave, they'll do things as they see fit, and that means your culture, the kind of experience you create for policyholders, and customers' trust in your insurance company, becomes something entirely outside your control.

Since you're going to have a culture regardless, the only real choice here is whether that culture works for you, or against you.

Building a practical culture: the operating big idea (OBI) 

A practical way to build an intentional culture capable of supporting consistent experiences that build trust is to create and execute what I call an Operating Big Idea, or OBI for short. It's a short, strategic statement that guides you and everyone on your team on how to consistently create experiences that build trust, reputation, and loyalty.

I developed the concept while studying the factors that build customer loyalty across several companies. Each one had a simple, unifying statement that all their operations revolved around, distinct from their vision, mission, or value proposition. That's why I call it an operating idea, it's what your operations are actually built on.

The Zappos example

Zappos' short statement is simply: WOW the customer. In other words, make the customer happy.

One story captures this perfectly. 

A customer, Zaz Lamarr, needed to return a pair of shoes but had just lost her mother and was out of town. When the Zappos team learned this, instead of waiting for her to ship the shoes back, they arranged to have them picked up from her home. Then, without being asked, they sent her a bouquet of flowers with a condolence note.

That story went on to build enormous goodwill and free advertising, existing customers felt proud of the brand, and new customers were drawn in by the story alone. Remember, at the time, Zappos only sold shoes.

As former CEO Tony Hsieh later said: 1"We didn't know it at the time, but all the investment in customer service and culture would pave the way for us to hit $1 billion in sales, two years ahead of schedule." They hit that target in 2008, the exact year the entire e-commerce industry was in a severe downturn. The downturn still affected them, but far less than it affected everyone else, because the customers who could still afford to buy a new pair of shoe, chose Zappos, out of trust.

How to create an OBI for your insurance company 

The OBI has 5 layers:

1. Vision: Why does your company exist? This is simply your vision statement.

2. Target customers: Who exactly are you serving? 

3. Benefits: What do customers actually get by choosing you over a competitor?

4. Value proposition: The promise you make to customers about why they should choose you. If you don't have one yet, skip this layer.

5. Emotions: How do you want customers to feel during every interaction? Excited? Confident? Comfortable?

Once you've worked through all five layers, ask one final question: 

What can we BE or DO every day, in every interaction, to make our customers feel these emotions? 

That answer becomes your OBI. It has to be something practical, something you can genuinely be or do. If it isn't, keep brainstorming with your team, you haven't found it yet.

Why emotions matter, even in insurance 

When I mentioned emotions during my session, everyone's face looked disconcerted. The standing question seemed to be: "What has emotions got to do with an insurance company?"

Everything!

Research by 2 Zhecho Dobrev studied more than 18,000 customers across 24 major companies, trying to answer one question: when it comes to earning loyalty, what matters more, rational factors like price and features, or emotional ones like feeling valued and safe? Emotion won, even in B2B relationships, not just B2C.

But if you'd asked those same customers directly, almost none would have said "emotion" was why they stayed loyal. They'd cite price, service speed, or ease of use.

Are they lying? Definitely not.

They genuinely don't recognise their own emotional reasoning, because we're trained to believe logic and emotion are opposites, and that serious, rational people don't let feelings drive decisions. So we default to logical explanations for choices that are purely emotional.

Another example:

In a famous supermarket experiment, researchers alternated playing French and German music next to a display of French and German wine. On days French music played, French wine sold more. On days German music played, German wine sold more. When customers were asked why they chose the wine they did, only 1 out of 44 mentioned the music. 86% insisted it had no effect on them. But the sales numbers cannot lie. The music did influence their feelings, and their purchase decision was based on that.

How about your own customers? Have you ever asked them why they renew their policy with you? Not why they buy insurance, but why they specifically keep renewing with you, when switching to a competitor is always an option. Most will mention price, coverage, or a convenient app. Very few will be able to identify the emotional grounds of that decision. They may struggle to realise that the transparency of your team made them feel safe, and that became the building block of their trust in your company.

In an industry fighting decades of bad feelings and distrust, I hope that with these few points, I've been able to help you see that the battle for trust and penetration is also emotional.

Building an OBI together

To make this more practical, we built an OBI live for a hypothetical company we called Proton.

• Vision: Help people live with less uncertainty

• Target customers: Drivers, car owners, health-conscious individuals

• Benefits: 24/7 health concierge, access to over 1,000 hospitals, strong third-party liability cover

• Value proposition: Absolute peace of mind

• Emotions:

  • Confident: firmly trusting Proton to pull through when needed.

  • Assured: complete confidence, free of doubt.

  • Serene: a deep sense of calm, untroubled by outside stress.

From these layers, Proton's big idea became: Keep their confidence safe.

What "keep their confidence safe" means

Literally, this means every single interaction either threatens a customer's confidence or protects it, there's no neutral ground. Every decision either withdraws from that confidence account, or deposits into it.

This also reframes how Proton's team has to evaluate their own work. The instinctive first question in this industry is often, does this comply with our policy and regulations? That question doesn't go away, but a second question now sits alongside it: did this action protect or damage this policyholder's confidence in us?

A claim can be processed entirely within the rules, fully compliant on paper, and still leave the customer's trust in ruins. Success can no longer be measured only by regulatory compliance. It also has to be measured by whether policyholders walked away more, or less, confident in the company.

Executing your OBI

Creating your OBI is the easy part. Execution is the other 99%, and it is not a glamorous process. It might get gruelling at some point, but the good thing is that once you get used to doing this unglamorous work, your company actually starts growing beyond average, and other companies look at your company and want to be like that, but most of them won't be able to, because they can't do the unglamorous foundational work that you have done.

Think about the people who dig the foundation of a house. They're usually the crew that people look down on because their work is not exciting or fancy. Nobody applauds them the way they applaud the interior decorator at the end. But without that unglamorous foundational work they do, the house will collapse. This is the same, do the unsexy work, and set your company on a stronger foundation.

I've selected two things you can start doing to implement your OBI. This isn't the full implementation plan, but I promise you, if you commit to just these two things, you'll get somewhere very great.

Step 1: Identify what the OBI means for each role 

Ask every team member, including yourself: 

1. What do I need to do differently to make this OBI real in my role? OR How does my role contribute to the success of the OBI?

Once that's identified, ask a second, often-overlooked question: 

2. What resources or capabilities do we need to make this work?

Some team members may just need a book or a soft-skills training. Some will require you to review and rebuild an existing process from scratch.

Note: You won't get every answer in one sitting, and that's fine. Move in cycles, what I call "strikes." Identify what you can, implement it over a few weeks, then return and go another round.

Step 2: Make the required mindset shifts and build behavioural strength 

I've built three sets of questions to help with this.

Set 1: what to amplify. Existing beliefs and behaviours already supporting the OBI.

• Which existing behaviours can we amplify to make the big idea our signature way of doing business?

• When customers thank or praise us, what specific behaviours do they usually highlight? These are things you currently do that make customers happy. Keep them up.

• Which current habits make our environment supportive for the OBI?

• What beliefs fuel these behaviours?

Set 2: what to limit. This is the hardest set, because it requires people to be honest about what's holding the company back.

• Where do we sometimes slip into "just doing the job" instead of truly connecting with customers and safeguarding their confidence?

• What assumptions do we hold about customers or our business that limit the OBI? The moment you announce the initiative to create experiences that build trust, everyone's mind will instinctively start generating reasons it won't work, that instinct is the assumption. Ask your team to write those reasons down as they surface, then question their credibility one by one, and check whether they're actually serving you or just protecting old habits.

• What current practices, if continued, will limit its impact?

• What beliefs fuel these behaviours?

You'll notice these questions get harder to answer honestly than the first set, and that's expected. Most of what will surface here won't be new information, it's usually already limiting the company in several other ways, whether the OBI is in the picture or not. So you're essentially asking your team to open up about their own shortcomings, and not everyone will want to do that.

For this set to actually work, you need psychological safety, your team's belief that sharing ideas, opening up about mistakes, or telling the truth won't get them punished or sidelined. Without that safety, people will not tell you the truth.

If a team member, for example, opens up in a meeting about what really led to a mistake, and in the next meeting, someone throws it back at them, "isn't this the same thing you did last time?", the moment people learn that honesty gets used against them later, they stop being honest. And once that happens, no consultant, however skilled, can get a straight answer out of your team. You end up paying to fly in experts but don't get much value from them, because they get stonewalled by your team or given false information, since your team doesn't feel safe enough to tell them, or you, the truth.

Most of the terrible organisational problems leaders eventually pay outside consultants to uncover could have been surfaced far earlier, and far more cheaply, if someone inside the company had simply felt safe enough to speak up the moment they saw the first spark, before it became a fire. This insight will help you get it right.

Set three: what to embrace. New beliefs and behaviours needed to bring the OBI to life.

• What new behaviours would bring our OBI to life in everyday operations?

• What beliefs can fuel these new behaviours?

Notes

1. Some mindset shifts take months, sometimes a year, before they begin to form instinctive behavior.

2. Some beliefs will be hard to identify. It's often only when your team hits obstacles that hidden beliefs begin to surface. That's why you'll need an ongoing, structured check-in rather than a single rollout meeting.

3 questions you or your team leads will need for the weekly check-in

1. What have you been working on to bring the OBI to life?

2. What obstacles are blocking your progress?

3. What has helped you get closer to that goal?

Pay close attention to question three. If one team member has found a faster way to make the OBI work, share it widely, don't let everyone independently discover what one person already figured out. You need to multiply your wins and accelerate your progress.

How to measure progress

Five metrics matter most here.

• Retention rate: how much of your customer base you've kept over a given period.

• NPS (Net Promoter Score): how likely your existing policyholders are to recommend you to others.

• NRR (Net Revenue Retention): how much of your revenue in a given period came from existing, retained customers.

• ENCR (Earned New Customer Rate): how much new revenue came specifically from referrals, not paid marketing.

• EGR (Earned Growth Rate): simply NRR + ENCR combined, the total revenue growth you've earned through trust and word of mouth, rather than bought through advertising.

Retention rate and NRR go hand in hand, one tells you how many customers you kept, the other tells you what that retention was actually worth financially.

NPS and ENCR work the same way, NPS tells you how likely people are to recommend you, ENCR tells you exactly how much revenue those recommendations produced.

Together, these five numbers are how you'll know whether the trust, reputation, and loyalty you're building through your OBI are translating into financial strength for the company.

Frequently asked questions

What is an Operating Big Idea (OBI)?

An Operating Big Idea is a short, strategic statement that guides everyone in a company on how to consistently create experiences that build trust. Unlike a vision or mission statement, an OBI is something every team member can actively be or do in daily interactions, not just something written on a wall.

How do you build trust in the insurance industry?

Trust is built by consistently creating experiences that make policyholders feel safe, comfortable, and less afraid when dealing with your company. This starts with an intentional company culture, not marketing, since culture (your beliefs and behaviours) shapes how every employee treats every customer at every touchpoint.

Can one insurance company build a good reputation even if the industry as a whole is distrusted?

Yes. A company's reputation starts with the experiences of its own existing policyholders. By focusing on building trust with the customers you already have, you generate positive word of mouth that gradually reshapes your own company's reputation, independent of how the wider industry is perceived.

Do emotions really matter in insurance, a supposedly rational purchase?

Yes. Research consistently shows that emotional factors, like feeling valued, safe, or heard, drive loyalty more than rational factors like price or features, even in B2B relationships.

The research specifically measured loyalty, but loyalty can't exist without trust first, a customer has to trust you before they'll stay loyal to you. So while the study didn't use the word "trust," the emotional drivers it found work in sync with the ones behind trust. Customers rarely recognise or state this themselves, since most people default to logical explanations for decisions that are actually emotionally driven.

Sources

1. Hsieh, Tony. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, p. 106.

2. Dobrev, Zhecho. The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions, pp. 22–30, 37.