Getting insured for the loss, damage or theft of a mobile phone has increased in importance in recent years as the value of modern mobile devices to consumers has increased. Today, mobiles are not just valuable in a financial sense, but are becoming valuable lifestyle devices, a sort of psychological Swiss Army knife, used to organise business and personal lives. Today over 9 million adults own a mobile phone insurance policy, with ownership and buying patterns analysed in the YouGov SixthSense report on Mobile Phone Insurance. This report extends the analysis in the previous report by focusing on the claims made on these insurance policies.
In this report, we highlight some of the issues surrounding the satisfaction with claims, how claims are processed and claims settlement. In addition to studying claims, the report also briefly discusses mobile phone ownership and key aspects of insurance policy ownership which impinge on claims.
Over 40 questions were asked in total, covering the following topics:
- Current ownership of mobile phone insurance
- Current ownership of mobile phones by the insured (e.g. number owned, value of handset owned, how handsets were acquired)
- Why some adults go uninsured
- How knowledgeable are policyholders about the insurance they hold and how this impacts on the claims experience
- The incidence of claiming (e.g. if a claim has been made and when it was made)
- The claims experience of claimants, how satisfied they were with the claims process and whether they raised any complaints at the time of claiming
- The claim settlement received
- If and why claims were rejected
- The impact of the claims experience on operator and insurance provider customer churn
Methodology
For this report, YouGov commissioned two surveys among its online panels. The first was a nationally representative UK sample of 2,022 UK mobile phone owners aged 18+. This sample allows estimates to be made of the number of adults claiming on their insurance and allows a comparison between mobile phone insurance owners and non-owners. The second sample was of 638 adults who had ever claimed on their mobile phone insurance. This sample was asked the same questions as the nationally representative UK sample and allows a more in-depth analysis of claimants to be made.
