This is an area that we continue to focus on as we recognise its importance to our customers. For clarity and making it easy for our customers to understand our communications, we remain in line with the industry, even though there has been a slight drop in our scores overall. We have seen an improvement of 3 percentage points in the relevance of our communications to our customers to 35 percentage points. We have also seen a small increase of 1 percentage point in prompting customers to take action, up to 29 points. Across the industry, ratings for written communications have remained fairly static since the survey started. Our scores reflect this, and we are currently in line with the industry average
Rating of written communications
Thinking about the statements and personalised letters you might have received from Legal & General in the last 12 months, how would you rate them?
% Rating Excellent/Very Good
Base = All respondents rating written communications in the past 12 months
Some scores may be subject to rounding
Source: ORC International
Customer Communications
As we highlighted in our 2008 report, our goal remains to make our communications clear and easy to understand, and to build a good relationship with our customers.
Customer communication has again been a major activity over the last 12 months. In our 2007 report we confirmed that we were introducing a style of language that we believe makes it easier for customers to understand us when we talk to them. As part of our activity to measure how well we are embedding our new style across the organisation we commissioned an independent review. This told us that we have made good progress, and achieved visible results in our written communications, with far more evidence of customer-friendly language. This is part of our long-term commitment to improving communications.
One example of the customer communications work we have done over the last year was a major programme to review the way we talk to our customers when they are about to retire. Here, we looked at how we make sure that customers understand their options, and the importance of taking advice at this stage in their lives. Customer research on our new retirement communications showed that customers clearly understood that:
- They need to take action
- They can shop around
- The importance of taking advice
As part of our ongoing commitment focus on customer communications, we will continue to use consumer feedback to drive further improvements.