Gracechurch Claims Quality winners announced; London's service holds up in face of pandemic upheaval

Gracechurch, the independent insurance research consultancy, has awarded its coveted Service Quality Marque to six London insurers in 2021, following a year in which the Market faced unprecedented service challenges.

The insurers achieving the 2021 Outstanding Service Quality Marque are: Aegis, Beazley, Chaucer, Chubb, Liberty Specialty Markets and Tokio Marine Kiln.

The winning insurers were all strongly recommended by claims broking specialists and consistently highly rated for communications, commerciality and maintaining strong relationships.

Ben Bolton MD comments:
"Great service is about investment, planning and consistent execution: the teams who gained the Gracechurch Service Quality Marque in 2020 showed that they could deliver no matter what was thrown at them.  They excelled in communications and worked with empathy, always making sure that brokers and customers were treated fairly and kept fully informed."

The study, among specialist claims brokers, showed a Market under severe strain in the first lockdown with brokers worried about service and whether some policies would be honoured, however the London Market demonstrated its resilience by maintaining service quality. 

"In the first wave of the pandemic, insurers were hit with the triple whammy of reviewing policy wordings, managing unprecedented enquiry volumes and setting claims teams up to operate from home. In the face of this the Market's response has to be commended, testament to the quality of London's specialist claims teams and to some extent because London was not the epicentre of the BI claims debacle."

But Bolton also warns that the Market cannot be complacent:

"London is competing with other global insurance hubs and claims service is an important deciding factor for where clients place risks.  London's service is still inconsistent, so there is an absolute necessity for the claims service bar to be raised across the Market. Showing what good looks like increases competition and leads to market service improvements overall."