Have you ever taken the time to actually buy the best home insurance that you can? I don’t just mean obtaining a quote from one, two or three price comparison sites and then maybe even a few direct insurers. Have you actually taken the time to look into what you’re buying and making an informed decision? And what does best even mean?
The most likely answer is that you haven’t, even if you’ve worked in the industry for years. Why? Well again, the most likely answer is that you place a degree of trust in the companies that you are obtaining quotes from and you expect them to all be relatively similar, so ultimately price and potentially reputation have the biggest influence in your buying decision. You only have so many hours in the day, and for the sake of £20 or £30, you’ll do some research but not necessarily as much as you could.
However, if you decide one wet Sunday afternoon to conduct the exercise thoroughly and have a spare hour to kill then you may be surprised.
Conducting the exercise
I’d recommend creating a spreadsheet, or you’ll alternatively need a very big piece of paper. Secondly, I’d suggest by starting the process by using your preferred price comparison website. For the top 3 prices returned, you’ll need to start recording the cover that’s included, so you’ll need to add a separate row to your spreadsheet for each category. Some sites display this under the ‘More Info’ button. You’ll find that there are over 30 variables for home insurance cover, some that’s included as standard, some that’s available at an additional cost, some that’s not available at all and some that quite frankly isn’t worth the cover because the excess amount means that you are highly unlikely to make a claim in the first place.
Once you’ve logged all the cover options for the first quote, add a second column to your spreadsheet and repeat the exercise recording the cover levels for the second insurer. You may already start to see a difference in the cover levels that weren’t perhaps immediately obvious when the information was held on separate screens. Add in new rows where additional cover is identified if necessary. Repeat again for the third quote and if you are really bored you could repeat a 4th and 5th quote to the spreadsheet.
What you’ll notice is that the biggest difference is typically found between the coverage levels of the add-on products. It’s very evident that not all add-ons are equal and offer the same level of coverage. If you deselect the add-ons in the coverage the standard policies are likely to be more closely aligned, but there are still some big differences. If you haven’t experienced this then it could be an example of brand stacking where one insurer/broker is behind multiple brands.
If you’ve deselected add-ons and then clicked through to the insurance site you’ll then be faced with a plethora of add-on options prior to making a payment. This is the insurer’s second opportunity to sell you the add-on products that perhaps you had left off your requirements. Some sites are much better at selling and convincing you that it’s worth paying extra to include the additional cover compared to others. You may be tempted to start selecting the add-ons but when you get to the payments page the final premium can be very different to that quoted on the initial price comparison site.
What if you clicked through on a different insurer site and selected the same add-ons, would the price be higher or lower? Therefore, once you’ve established which add-on products you really want to buy, go back to the original price comparison site and make sure you only have these selected. However, to complicate matters further some insurers offer add-ons products that aren’t available on the main price comparison sites, so doing a like for like comparison can be almost impossible.
So what’s your overall conclusion?
Hopefully, this rather dull and laborious exercise has enhanced your knowledge of home insurance and the add-on products available, but also highlighted the differences in cover. I’d recommend any senior managers involved in the distribution of insurance to conduct this exercise. Ultimately ask yourself, is this the experience that we should be offering the general public aged from 18 – 100, ranging from the most intelligent to the most vulnerable?
I think not, it needs improving and that’s where Small Print Compare can help. Contact us today to arrange a demo of our solution, suitable for price comparison sites, insurers, and brokers.
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