Best & Worst Life Insurance Providers: J.D. Power, 2024

One of the main issues holding down satisfaction scores for U.S. individual life insurance this year was confusion, according to J.D. Power.

The Troy, Michigan-based consumer satisfaction measurement firm revamped its life insurance survey program this year. The new results can’t be compared with results from 2023 or earlier.

But analysts at the firm say consumers were especially critical of life insurers’ communication strategies.

“Currently, only 29% of life insurance customers ‘strongly agree’ that their insurer makes complex policies simpler,” Breanne Armstrong, a J.D. Power insurance specialist, said in a comment on the results. “The old model of text-heavy binders and jargon-filled informational packets will no longer cut it.”

Many younger life insurance policyholders in the sample told J.D. Power they were looking for links to educational videos and other materials to explain how to read their life insurance statements.

J.D. Power included 21 life insurers in the study. It received satisfaction survey responses from 4,731 owners of individual life insurance policies.