How to Improve Customer Experience in Insurance | UserView

It's the first week of January. Someone has just enrolled in your health plan and is trying to get started. They have a new member ID, a portal they've never used, and no idea where to find their coverage details.

After 20 minutes of clicking around, they give up, a little embarrassed, and call your support team. But confusing portals are only part of the problem. In a KFF survey of more than 3,600 insured adults, 51% said at least one aspect of their health insurance was difficult to understand.

And the questions keep coming. Is this specialist in-network? Where can I find my plan details? Why did I get a bill for a visit I thought was covered? Often, a member calls back about the same insurance claim because they missed a step the first time.

The fine print isn't going anywhere, but improving customer experience at insurance companies can still mean one clear answer instead of three long, frustrating phone calls. Here's where the industry stands today, and what your team can do about it.

The state of customer service in the insurance industry

The insurance industry has invested heavily in customer service strategies and digital tools, but satisfaction has barely moved. JD Power's 2026 study found that the average satisfaction score for commercial health plans is 562 out of 1,000, virtually unchanged over the past three years.

Here's what's behind that flat score:

KFF found that 57% of insured adults contacted their insurer at least once over 12 months, most often to ask whether something was covered
Comm100's benchmark data shows that 99.7% of insurance live chat interactions start with a chatbot, yet only 34.7% end with the problem solved by one
Forrester reports that more than half of health insurance customers experiencing frustration or other negative emotions wouldn't consider buying anything else from their insurer

Trust works the other way too. In the same Forrester research, 53% of members who trust their health insurer would pay a premium for better service.

In other words, the same conversations that push members away can also make them more valuable, and that's the real upside for any team working to improve customer experience at insurance companies.

Naturally, not everything is a support problem. But for many insurance providers, trust is decided in everyday moments, like when a member reaches out with a simple coverage question, gets a bot that doesn't have the answer, and hopes a person will follow up with the next steps after the call ends.

What happens next decides whether they walk away trusting you a little more, or a little less. Below are customer service strategies for the insurance industry built around the moments that turn simple questions into trust, or frustration. If you're also looking at the sales side, our guide to improving customer experience in the insurance industry covers how to keep prospects from abandoning a quote.

How to improve customer experience in insurance companies

1. Rewrite your help center around real member questions

Many members check your website before contacting support, but help articles are either full of insurance jargon or outdated. Every article that misses the mark sends another member to your queue, often with a question that should have taken a minute to answer.

To keep your help center useful all year:

Use your support conversations to decide which articles to write or fix first, starting with the questions you hear most
Show members where to click, with screenshots of the portal pages they'll see
Keep your chatbot and help center working from the same answers, so members never get two different replies

2. Explain coverage and next steps in plain language

Improving customer experience in insurance often starts with a simple fact: most coverage questions aren't hard. The answers just come wrapped in words like deductible, coinsurance, and prior authorization. And when a conversation doesn't end with a clear next step, members either do nothing or call back.

To make every answer easier to act on:

Swap insurance terms for everyday words, and when a term is unavoidable, define it in one sentence
End every message, chat, or call with the one thing the member needs to do next
Build a shared library of plain-language replies to your most common questions, so every agent says it the same way

3. Make it easy to reach a person

Chatbots handle simple tasks well, like checking a claim status or finding a form. But a member confused about their coverage needs a conversation, and a bot that keeps looping back to the same options only adds to the frustration. For members who already feel awkward asking for help, every extra step is another reason to give up. Here's how to use both chatbots and live chat without trapping members in automation.

To keep human help within reach:

Put a clear "talk to someone" option inside the chatbot and the portal, not buried in a menu
Route conversations to an agent as soon as a member mentions words like "denied," "bill," or "covered," instead of making them exhaust the bot first
Offer a callback with a real-time window, so members don't have to choose between holding and giving up

4. Connect your support stack to your member portal

Reaching an agent only helps if they can see what's going on. When live chat, the helpdesk, and the portal don't talk to each other, members repeat their story at every step, and your agents ask questions the system should already know. Our guide on how to implement live chat support walks through connecting chat to the rest of your stack.

To connect your support tools:

Add live chat or a direct phone line to the pages where coverage questions come up, not just the homepage
Link chat with your helpdesk or the CRM your insurance agents already use, so members only verify their identity once, and their details and past conversations follow every handoff
Plan for the integrations your workflow needs, like secure messaging for sharing plan documents and cobrowsing for walking members through the portal

5. Train agents for empathy as much as accuracy

Your agents are often expected to explain dense legal documents with no healthcare or legal background. Getting the details right matters, but so does how a member feels when the conversation ends. A correct reply delivered in a rush can still leave someone confused and anxious. In the end, the strongest customer service strategies for the insurance industry invest in people as much as tools.

To give your team both skills:

Coach empathy as a skill, like letting the member finish their story before suggesting a solution, then saying, "Thanks for walking me through that. Here's what we'll do."
Pair newer agents with experienced ones on complex coverage questions until they're confident on their own
Ask frontline agents where people get stuck, and use what they hear to improve training and materials

6. Find out why people keep calling

A member who reaches out twice about the same issue is telling you something. Maybe the first reply missed the point, maybe a letter was unclear, or maybe the portal sent them in circles. Each repeat contact takes up your team's time and chips away at that member's trust.

To cut down on repeat contacts:

Tag every conversation with its reason, so you can spot which topics keep bringing members back
Track first contact resolution alongside speed, since a quick conversation that solves nothing only leads to another one
Trace repeat topics to their source, whether that's a confusing letter, a portal page, or a gap in training, and fix the problem there

Plain language, easy access, and connected tools go a long way when you're figuring out how to improve customer experience in insurance.

But when you look closely at your longest calls or chats, you'll notice a lot of time goes to an agent describing where to click while a member searches their portal for coverage details, a covered doctor, or the reason behind a bill. These are some of the common reasons for slow ticket resolution. Fortunately, these conversations can get much shorter when your agent can see the same screen.

Guide members through their portal with cobrowsing

Cobrowsing lets your agent join a member on your website or portal and see exactly what they see. With one click or a short code, the agent can point, highlight, and scroll right on the member's screen, so instead of describing where to click, they can click for your members.

Unlike screen sharing, there's nothing to download and no video call to join. Your agent only sees your own site, never the member's desktop or other tabs, and sensitive fields stay masked. And because cobrowsing shares the page itself instead of a video, it stays sharp even on a slow connection.

With UserView cobrowsing for insurance, your agents can:

Answer coverage questions on the spot: Open the member's plan details together and point to the exact section
Explain bills and statements line by line: A surprise charge on an explanation of benefits finally makes sense
Find in-network doctors together: Use your provider directory side by side, instead of describing search filters over the phone
Guide members through claims and payments: Help members with clicking, so they know the way next time
Keep protected health information private: Field masking, audit trails, and permission controls, backed by HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, and ISO 27001 compliance (see how cobrowsing stays safe)
Start in seconds from the tools your team already uses: Connect Salesforce, Zendesk, and Intercom, or build it into your own portal through a cobrowsing API

When members don't find the answer, show them. It's one of the fastest ways to improve customer experience in insurance. Try a UserView interactive demo yourself, or book a UserView demo and see how one shared screen can turn long chats and phone calls into one quick conversation.

How to Improve Customer Experience in the Insurance Industry