We’re in the 100th percentile for NPS. What does that mean?

At Haven Life, we believe buying life insurance online can and should be easy. But you know what isn’t easy? Getting a high NPS rating. And we did it anyway! (And all during a pandemic, when demand was at an all-time high.)

For a business, NPS (which stands for Net Promoter Score) is essentially a measure of how your customers feel about you. The score comes from the answers customers give to a series of standardized questions that cover every aspect of your service. Because the questions are standardized — not adapted by a business to get positive feedback — NPS is a very reliable way to find out how Haven Life customers really feel. (Your score can even be negative.) That’s why it’s used by more than two thirds of Fortune 500 companies. People who answer the questions also give detailed feedback about what the pros and cons and what they like and dislike about the company in question.

Haven Life is now in the 100th percentile for NPS scores in our industry. (We are about 30 points above most of our peers in the life insurance industry.) Life insurance is not generally viewed as a sexy product (we have no idea why), so it’s rare for customers to be enthusiastic enough about their life insurance options to get a high NPS score. As a point of comparison, Apple is famous for having a high NPS score. Theirs is in the 70s, and so is ours.

We asked Haven Life’s brand director, Adam Weinberg, to tell us a bit more about what our high life insurance NPS score means.

Why does this feel like such an achievement?

One of the things about NPS – for some this might be frustrating, but I think it’s a nice thing – is that it really is a true team effort. There’s no one single thing that contributes to an NPS score. It’s not because your home page is pretty, and it’s not because your website has no technical bugs. An NPS score takes the whole customer experience into account – it’s not easy to manipulate or change. If you get a low NPS, you can’t just make a couple of switches and suddenly you have a high one. In order to get a high score you really need to have everything buttoned up, from the back end tech side of things to the email you send people after they become policyholders.

Why do you think Haven Life got such a positive response from customers?

In general I don’t think people expect to have an overwhelmingly positive response to their life insurance agency, but the NPS results show that Haven Life customers do. One of our key brand missions from the beginning has been to create a community and an experience that treats policyholders as more than policy numbers. I think the fact that people said they’d recommend Haven Life shows we’re achieving that. People saying they’ll tell their family and friends about Haven Life is, for me, the best sign of affirmation that we’re achieving what we want to achieve.

What feedback are you happiest about?

Seeing the positive feedback to our customer support team means a lot to me, because everyone has some customer support nightmares that they’ve dealt with in their life. But I know that if an applicant or policyholder reaches out to our support team that actually plays to our strengths. Not only is that team friendly and empathetic, they’re also extremely knowledgeable and they know how to communicate to different customers and applicants in a way that instills confidence.

Also, we’ve been very focused on communicating in a way that values people’s time. If you go to a typical insurance website it might be overwhelming; there’s a lot of jargon. We try to streamline that: Some of our most commonly cited areas of success for NPS are communication and customer experience.

Was there any customer feedback that suggests room for improvement?

We read all of our NPS feedback  — positive and negative — we share it with the whole team, and it has a profound impact on how we direct our strategy. Hearing about areas of strength is great, but we go right into the areas for improvement and see what we can do to address those. We use it to influence everything from site design, feature ideas, blog stories. From the NPS survey, we’re seeing people who want more tools to educate themselves in the life insurance shopping process. There are also people who now want physical copies of their policy, so we’re working on something physical for policyholders to launch in the coming months.

Putting customers first is front and center in our core values. I’ve worked at Haven Life for four years and the importance we put on feedback has not changed one iota since I joined. Our high NPS score shows that holistically as a team we’re really pulling in the right direction.