Insurance is a requirement of living in the modern world. Most people will personally need household insurance and/or car insurance, and owners of businesses have a whole load of additional insurance products aimed at them such as professional indemnity and liability insurance, some mandatory, some optional.
Given that this produces a large, fairly captive market, albeit one with a lot of choice of providers, why do insurance companies do such an awful job of dealing with their existing customers when it comes up to renewal. To take a recent case, when my car insurance came up for renewal recently, I got an automatic offer from my existing insurer through the post. Considering that I had changed my car for a lower insurance group car, had been with the current insurer for a year with no claims, I was surprised and/or annoyed to see the “best deal” quote I was being offered was more than the previous year. A quick search around and I found an equivalent deal at slightly over half the renewal quote, and accepted that.
Of course, when I called up my current insurer to let them know I would not be renewing, they immediately searched again and found me a “better deal”. Why was I not offered this immediately? Why when looking on a comparison site, were they offering better rates then they were offering me direct for renewals? The “better offer” was still not as good as the one I had from another insurer, so they lost my business, but if they had come up with a decent renewal quote to begin with, they might have kept my business.