The data is clear: Overall customer satisfaction—and customer trust levels—rise when U.S. auto and home insurance customers have confidence that they understand their policies.
Executive Summary
Customers who understand what their insurance policies cover have more trust in their carriers, according to Stephen Crewdson and Craig Martin of JD Power. But surprisingly, while both say that ensuring that customers completely trust their agents is a best practice for building trust, they've also found that customers who buy through agents are less likely to understand their policies. Here, the two analysts provide their thoughts on what's going on and offer other recommendations to help carriers elevate trust scores.But more than 40% of them don’t. And more than half of insurance customers surveyed by JD Power over the course of the last three years have low levels of trust in their insurers.
“That key performance indicator of what the overall satisfaction score will be—the KPI that they understand their policy and what it covers—has been in our auto study all the way back to 2000. And insurers haven’t moved the needle that much,” said Stephen Crewdson, managing director of insurance business intelligence at JD Power.
Digging into some of the information sitting behind results of the 2026 U.S. Auto Insurance Study published in early June, Crewdson revealed that the average satisfaction score of 644 across more than 52,000 respondents (measured on a 1,000-point scale) plummeted to 568 for those survey takers who didn’t feel they understood their policies. For those reporting confidence in their understanding of what their policies would cover, the score rose to 695—127 points higher than the uninformed group.
