Our customers

Supporting transitions and scaling sustainable solutions

Providing sustainable solutions to our customers is at the core of our business strategy. We aim to support them with insurance and risk management solutions that support a climate-neutral economy.

In 2021, we launched the insurance industry’s first carbon neutral world equity fund. It combines investment in low-emission companies with carbon offsetting, for life insurance customers.

We are also increasing our repair-not-replace options as well as offering more sustainable services during claims processes. For example, in Brazil we are the first insurer to certify car body repair shops for sustainable practices and make them available to our customers.

Zurich’s sustainable energy strategy underpins development of our energy book and helps support customers as they transition to lower carbon operating models. During 2022 we restructured our team of experts, blending the old world of energy with the new to mirror our customers and better help them accelerate the energy transition. We have expanded our sustainable energy offering, developing skills internally as well as hiring industry experts where needed, and built further knowledge and expertise in this rapidly changing market.

Our sustainable energy strategy is built on three layers:

• Engagement and review of transition plans.
• Upskilling and cross skilling in sustainable energy within underwriting, risk engineering and claims.
• Continued development of solutions to address emerging technologies in this area.

We also help commercial customers build resilience to climate change and support their net-zero transition through our Climate Resilience Proposition.

Engagement with our customers and investee companies to ensure that they have viable transition plans is our priority. We would rather help our customers join us on our journey to net-zero than divest or end a relationship without trying first.

Sustainable solutions meeting our internal criteria generated approximately USD 566 million (0.7 percent of our total gross written premiums and policy fee income) in revenues during 2022 (USD 289 million in 2021), with the largest contributions coming from North America at USD 238 million and EMEA with USD 177 million, providing a percentage increase of 377.3 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively.

Below are examples of solutions that incentivize health, safety, and/or environmentally responsible actions and/or behavior.

We offer retail customers in Austria a 20 percent payback, above the cost of a property restoration after damage, when environmentally friendly materials are used in reconstruction. In Ireland, we offer a discount on motor cover to those customers who also own a commuter ticket for travel on public transport.

In North America, we cover additional costs that might occur when choosing environmentally friendly alternatives to rebuild property after damage, thereby helping customers rebuild in compliance with existing or emerging green standards.

In Indonesia, we provide health protection for those who would not ordinarily get cover, for example those who have existing health conditions, as well as those who have been diagnosed with dengue, typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria, and meningitis.​

LiveWell – Make health a habit

LiveWell and its global team have a strong passion for people sustainability and health-related topics. They are helping customers make health a habit and building a global community of users engaged in their health, supporting one another, and contributing to a more resilient, sustainable society. With a focus on each user’s personal goal, changing needs and motivation type, they combine health science with leading behavioral science to put users in control and empower them to build healthy habits and improve their holistic wellbeing – covering physical, mental, social and financial health.

LiveWell believes each individual has the right to life-long good health and quality of life. Its mission is to empower its users to make health a habit, fostering behavior change that positively impacts their holistic wellbeing and improves health outcomes irrespective of where they are in their health journey.

Driving electromobility forward   

In 2022, Zurich Switzerland’s subsidiary Zurich Schweiz Service AG launched Zurich Z Volt, a unit price offering for electric car charging. This new initiative offers an alternative to the often complicated and untransparent electric vehicle charging models. 

Users get a free account which provides access to numerous charging stations across Switzerland and also in other parts of Europe. They can charge their electric vehicle without any hidden costs and pay directly - either via the app or the physical charging card. There is no basic fee or subscription fee. In addition, electric vehicle drivers who do not have a Zurich policy are also able to benefit from a flat price.  Currently restricted to persons domiciled in Switzerland.

Differentiating via sustainability impact

As a responsible investor, we use capital markets to fund solutions to some of the pressing social or environmental issues of our time, putting our assets to work for good while making a secure return to cover customer claims.

In 2022, Zurich's impact investment portfolio of USD 6.3 billion helped avoid 3.2 million metric tons of CO2e emissions and improved the lives of 4.7 million people¹. We committed to investing 5 percent of our proprietary investment portfolio to impact investments by 2025, which will help grow our allocation to climate solutions and investments benefiting society.

¹ Please see www.zurich.com/sustainability/customers/investing-responsibly/impact-investment for more details on impact investing approach. Impact numbers for 2021 and following include methodology upgrade, as explained in Zurich’s impact measurement methodology paper.

Providing customer care with empathy

We continue to evolve our customer experience by listening and acting on customer feedback through our net promoter system (NPS) program. We interviewed around 1.2 million customers in 2022 across our business and acted based on their feedback. Actions ranged from small process optimizations to more sizable measures, such as collaborating with leading tech firms to co-create new technology solutions to deliver a more frictionless customer experience. Beyond this, we have established our Customer Experience Vision and a set of CX Standards which raise the bar on how we aim to deliver our products and services to our customers in both our retail and commercial business.

Conscious that claims touchpoints are one of the most significant moments of truth for our customers, we are increasing our focus on offering claims services that better support our customers and communities to become more resilient to risk through loss prevention and care (e.g., trauma counseling in the UK). In addition, we are addressing customer communication and tone of voice and up-skilling our front-line employees to treat customers with empathy (e.g., vulnerable customer training in Australia).

At Zurich we recognize that making a claim is an important moment of truth during a customer’s experience. It provides us with the opportunity to deliver on our promise at what is often a difficult time for our customers. For this reason, around 20 percent of the touchpoints covered by our Transactional NPS program (tNPS) are during claims processes. Zurich’s Claims philosophy places our customers at the heart of the claims handling process by ensuring we treat them with empathy, by being responsive, proactive and communicating clearly.

Zurich’s global data commitment, which was announced in September 2019, aims to inspire confidence in a digital society. This commitment includes the promise never to sell customers’ personal data nor to share their personal data without being fully transparent. This means customers will always be informed if their personal data is shared, and with whom. Third parties with whom Zurich does share personal data are bound by enforceable contracts, which set out how that personal data can be used.

Zurich also pledges to use data to do what is best for customers. That means, for example, using insights from data to provide innovative services that help to prevent incidents and reduce risk. In this way, Zurich can provide both traditional products for risk transfer as well as risk avoidance. Such services can be used for home protection, to improve health and well-being.

We are confident that we are moving in the right direction to offer products and services that are attractive and relevant to our retail and commercial customers. Likewise, we continue to evolve our customer experience through small and large actions across the Group to meet and exceed their needs.