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Customers’ Satisfaction and Insurance Intermediaries:An Ordered Probit Analysis
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The essence of providing sophisticated services has helped the insurance sector to become increasingly competitive and market oriented. In such a competitive milieu, survival and success of Indian life insurers depends on the quality of services rendered by distribution channels. So, the present study examined satisfaction of customers towards distribution channels of insurance industry in India. For the purpose of analysis, customers’ satisfaction has been regressed with various benefits received as well as problems faced by them respectively, while dealing with intermediaries, along with demographic variables. For this, sample of 617 policyholders has been taken from three cities of Punjab (India) and data have been analysed using Ordered Probit Regression. The research findings revealed some significant relationships of customers’ satisfaction with respect to benefits, problems and demographic variables. But the magnitude of effect of customer relationship management is more prominent than other benefits whereas magnitude of effect of difficulty in availing services is strong predictor among other problems faced by the policyholders. This paper offers insight to distribution channels that can help them in designing insurance services for the policyholders, in which they would emphasize on enhancement of said benefits and curb addressed problems to intensify the level of satisfaction.
Keywords
Policyholders, Satisfaction, Intermediaries, Insurance Industry, India, Ordered Probit Model.
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