Description of the Customer Reference Model in the Insurance Industry

Abstract

Objective One of the most powerful and yet unknown methods of finding new policyholders is customer referral. In the opinion of many experts, insurance referral sales or attracting insurance referral policyholders is the best way to sell insurance and the most powerful customer acquisition tool, so the insurance industry leaders have named it "referral miracle". Methodology The current research was conducted with the purpose of explaining the pattern of influencing factors on customer reference in the insurance industry, using the Delphi technique. The population of this study consists of academic experts and senior managers of insurance companies that using the purposeful sampling method, 8 academic experts and 12 senior managers and expert experts of insurance companies and 3 marketers and sales experts, were selected as Delphi expert panel members. The tools of data collection in this research are library studies and Delphi questionnaire. Findings In this study, collecting data by using the library method, reviewing the texts and viewing done. These data as factors related to the Customer referral, they were considered the basis of the Delphi method. Then, the Delphi questionnaire was sent to them in three stages to get the opinions of the expert panel members, and it was studied and revised. Conclusion The identified items were classified in the form of 5 categories of factors related to customers, factors related to the company, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer reference and were presented in the framework of the research model.

Keywords

• customer referral
• customer portfolio
• insurance industry
• referral sales