Customer Expectations for Sustainability in the Swiss Insurance Market

Abstract

Climate change is a significant threat, and insurance can provide a significant impulse to provide systemic responses. While several normative frameworks for sustainable business models have been developed, it is still unclear what customers expect and how companies should actually act in their specific business environments. We investigated customer expectations in the context of Swiss retail insurance and found that less than a fifth of customers consider sustainability a very important factor in their next purchase decision, and that core customers in the 35–54 age range are comparatively less concerned about sustainability in general. Customers place most value on social rather than environmental issues. Insurers should improve their efforts in the core business, especially regarding sustainable claims handling, rather than regarding investment management or their own footprint. On the other hand, more than 40% of customers do not feel they know enough to have an opinion about their insurer’s efforts toward sustainability, and there were no significant differences in customer perceptions among the different insurers. These results should have profound implications for communication, business model development, and business transformation efforts for insurers. They also provide important missing detail about customer expectations regarding sustainability in the academic literature.