How we calculate our customer experience ratings
Our unique Customer Experience Ratings help consumers find companies that offer a good service.
We only rate brands which have at least some direct-to-consumer products, including those sold through comparison sites.
Fairer Finance Customer Experience Ratings are published twice a year – once in the spring, and once in the autumn.
Why we developed our ratings
The way that consumers buy financial products has changed over the past two decades. The growth of comparison sites has led to many more customers making their own choices when it comes to financial products, rather than taking advice.
Customers are now looking for shortcuts to make better decisions. Comparison sites have made it easy for customers to compare prices - but it's important that they can also compare products and brands on quality and service.
Our ratings are designed to help customers make more informed decisions, but they should not be taken as recommendations or advice. Every customer has different needs, and our ratings are simply designed as a short cut to help consumers make sense of the complex world of financial products.
Customer Experience Ratings: our criteria
There are four key metrics we use in our Customer Experience Ratings.
How happy are a firm’s customers?
How much do customers trust the firm?
How good is the provider at handling complaints?
How transparent is the provider?
However, in life insurance we don’t poll customer happiness and trust. Instead, we ask:
What percentage of life insurance claims are paid?
Each of these criteria is expressed as a percentage. We then work out the mean average of the four scores, which gives the overall percentage score for our Customer Experience Ratings.
How we gather data for these ratings
Happiness and trust
We use consumer polling to measure happiness and trust. Polling is conducted by independent polling company Opinium, using their nationally representative panel.
We receive tens of thousands of responses from these surveys every six months. These responses are analysed to provide a happiness and a trust score for each brand in our ratings. To learn more about our sample size please click here.
Complaints
To see how good financial firms are at handling complaints, we use data published by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). The fewer the complaints upheld in the customer’s favour at the FOS, the better the complaints performance of the company. We weight the most recent FOS data against data from previous periods to work out complaints scores for each six-month period.
For companies that receive too few complaints to be published in the FOS data tables we either submit an FOI request to the FOS for that data, or we receive it directly from the company.
As the FOS publishes data by underwriter, some companies' scores are calculated using the combined complaints data of many firms with the same underwriter. Some companies choose to send us their FOS complaints data directly so that their score only reflects complaints directly related to them. If you would like to send us direct complaints data please contact corporate@fairerfinance.com.
Transparency
To see how transparent brands, we conduct our own analysis of purchase journeys and related terms and conditions or policy documents.
When analysing at a brand’s purchase journey, we check whether the key product information is provided – and how clearly explained and signposted this information is.
With product documents, we assess the clarity of the document’s design and language.
The purchase journey makes up 75% of the overall transparency score, with document analysis making up the other 25%.
Claims paid (life insurance only)
Providers publish ‘claims paid’ as a percentage every year.
We weight the most recent data against data from previous years. And then use further calculations to create our ‘claims paid’ percentage and the overall score in our Customer Experience Ratings.
If you want to take a more in-depth look at exactly how these scores are calculated, take a look at the PDF at the bottom of this page.
Ratings calculation
Once these key indicators have been analysed, and a Customer Experience Rating awarded, we apply further calculations to award Fairer Finance Ribbons.
We calculate the normal distribution of scores providers receive in each product area. This calculates where providers’ scores sit in relation to the product area average in terms of standard deviation.
Companies that receive a normal distribution score of 0.8 or above receive a Fairer Finance Gold Ribbon.
Those that receive a normal distribution score between 0.7 and 0.8 receive a Fairer Finance Silver Ribbon. And those that receive a normal distribution score between 0.6 and 0.7 receive a Fairer Finance Bronze Ribbon.
All other scores are not awarded a Fairer Finance Ribbon.
What our Customer Experience Ratings mean
Gold Ribbon
Brands that receive a Fairer Finance Gold Ribbon have received a normal distribution score of 80% or higher, meaning they are in the top 20% of brands. They tend to excel at handling complaints, and at explaining the key features of the product in their documents and product journeys. They also tend to have the happiest and most trusting customers.
Silver Ribbon
Brands that are awarded a Fairer Finance Silver Ribbon have received a normal distribution score between 70% and 80%. They tend to have a strong record of handling complaints, and do a great job of explaining the key features of the product. They also tend to have happy and trusting customers.
Bronze Ribbon
Brands that are awarded a Fairer Finance Bronze Ribbon have received a normal distribution score between 60% and 70%. They tend to have a good record of handling complaints, and do a good job of explaining the key features of the product. They also tend to have fairly happy and trusting customers.
If you’d like to discuss using product endorsements on your marketing material - or find out more about out methodology, please email corporate@fairerfinance.com.