Autosure
From 3.1 to 4.6 Stars: How Autosure Built Trust With Customers It Never Meets
How an intermediated insurer used Customer Radar to turn a blind spot in customer experience into its biggest competitive advantage.
Results at a glance
3.1 → 4.6★Google star rating
(165 → 3,000+ reviews)
67Net Promoter Score, world class for an intermediated insurer
45,000+Survey responses collected through Customer Radar
About Autosure
Autosure is the insurance arm of Turners Automotive Group (TAG), helping New Zealanders protect their vehicles through mechanical breakdown insurance, payment protection and motor vehicle insurance. Autosure doesn't sell to customers directly, its products are sold through around 700 car dealers and finance companies nationwide, and it also operates white-label programmes for partners including Turners, the AA, Ford and Avanti. Once a customer takes out a policy, Autosure takes over responsibility for policy changes and claims. With that model comes a strong internal focus on compliance, conduct and culture, and a business built on trust it has to earn without ever meeting most of its customers face to face.
The Challenge: Accountable for an Experience It Couldn't See
Before 2019, Autosure had no customer experience metric at all. Every policy is sold by a third-party agent, not by Autosure itself, which meant the business was accountable for the end-to-end customer experience without any direct line of sight into it.
"Although we don't sell direct to customers, we are still accountable to our customers for their end-to-end experience. As we're not there with them at the time, we needed visibility over their experience and a rigorous way of measuring customer satisfaction."
— Natalie Ross-Murphy, Marketing Manager, Autosure
That gap created three compounding problems. First, without statistically viable feedback, Autosure could only act on anecdotes from agents and the occasional customer complaint, not enough to identify real strengths or training gaps. Second, unhappy customers had no fast channel to be heard, raising the risk that confusion or dissatisfaction would escalate into a complaint, a lapsed policy, or a public review before Autosure even knew there was a problem. Third, Autosure's online reputation was light: in July 2020 it held just a 3.1-star Google rating from 165 reviews, which is nowhere near strong enough to build trust with new customers looking for an insurer they'd never interact with directly.
Underpinning all of it was a structural challenge: Autosure sells through multiple channels and white-label brands, so any feedback programme had to work across a genuinely complex, multi-brand business without overwhelming the customers or agents at the centre of it.
The Solution: A Fix Mapped to Every Business Challenge
Autosure's sister company, Turners Cars, was already running Customer Radar's post-purchase survey programme. When Autosure's GM heard how simple and actionable it was, the team brought Customer Radar in to build a Voice of Customer programme purpose-built for an intermediated insurer.
"We quickly realised that Customer Radar would increase our response rates considerably, as their process makes it fast and easy for customers to give feedback."
Natalie Ross-Murphy
Marketing Manager, Autosure
1. No visibility into the end-customer experience
The business challenge: Autosure had no way to hear directly from customers after a policy was sold through an agent.
The Customer Radar fix: Customer Radar's automated post-purchase survey gives Autosure a direct, real-time feedback channel to every customer, independent of the agent network, accessible on a 24/7 dashboard.
The result: Autosure has now collected more than 45,000 survey responses through Customer Radar, including a rich library of written comments, giving it, for the first time, statistically viable data to benchmark and track over time, including the ability to segment comments by themes like trust and loyalty and monitor how they shift over time.
2. A feedback invitation process that hadn't been optimised for a complex, multi-brand business
The business challenge: Autosure sells its own Autosure-branded policies alongside white-label programmes for Turners, the AA, Ford and Avanti, and many customers hold more than one policy. Without a carefully designed process, feedback invitations risked feeling generic, repetitive or poorly timed.
The Customer Radar fix: Customer Radar worked with Autosure to optimise the entire invitation process, consolidating multiple policies and brands into a single, relevant feedback request per customer, refining subject lines and messaging for maximum engagement, and hiding long tracking links behind a clean "click here" button.
The result: A simpler, more relevant invitation experience for customers, and a feedback process that consistently drives strong response volumes across every brand Autosure sells under.
3. Unhappy customers going unheard until it was too late
The business challenge: Without a way to flag dissatisfied customers immediately, small issues, confusion over cover, an unclear excess, risked turning into escalated complaints or negative reviews before Autosure's team even knew.
The Customer Radar fix: Customer Radar automatically alerts Autosure's Risk Officer in real time whenever a customer rates their experience 1–6 out of 10, so the team can follow up and close the loop immediately, without trawling through every comment looking for problems.
The result: Faster resolution, reduced risk of issues escalating or damaging the brand publicly, and, by Autosure's own account, detractors who've been won back as promoters and repeat customers.
4. No structured way to coach the agent network
The business challenge: As an intermediated business, Autosure had no consistent way to give the 700 dealers and finance companies selling its products structured, evidence-based feedback on how they were representing the brand.
The Customer Radar fix: The dashboard is segmented by customer, product, policy number, agent and salesperson, with a word cloud and themed comment tracking, so Autosure's sales team can review an agent's recent comments and NPS before every regular call cycle.
The result: Specific, actionable coaching, for example, making sure agents clearly explain excess options at point of sale, plus a built-in way to recognise high-performing agents by name, which Autosure says helps those agencies retain their own staff.
5. A light, unreliable online reputation
The business challenge: A 3.1-star Google rating from just 165 reviews gave prospective customers little confidence in an insurer they'd never deal with directly, and no way to stand out from competitors.
The Customer Radar fix: Customer Radar built Google review requests into the same VOC process, prompting customers who'd just given feedback to also leave a public review, a natural, non-intrusive ask rather than a separate campaign.
The result: Autosure's rating climbed to 4.6 stars from more than 3,000 reviews, a volume and score Autosure says no competitor in its category comes close to matching, and one that now shapes the first impression anyone gets when they search for the brand.
6. Limited in-house resources to run it all
The business challenge: Autosure's marketing team had limited experience with the technical side of email delivery, and needed the programme to run with minimal ongoing admin.
The Customer Radar fix: Customer Radar ran a structured, weekly onboarding process, helped troubleshoot the Mailchimp integration, advised on refining subject lines and invitation wording to improve engagement, and manages Autosure's monthly prize-draw incentive on its behalf.
The result: A smooth rollout across a complex multi-brand business ("a breeze," in Natalie's words) and a programme that runs day-to-day without adding to the team's workload.
The Results: From No Data to a Data-Driven Business
Autosure's NPS held steady in the mid-60s through the disruption of the COVID-19 period, then began climbing from around July 2022 and now sits at 67, a score Autosure considers world class for an intermediated insurance product, where the result reflects trust in a promise rather than a completed claims experience.
"The info we receive soaks into every part of our business, helping us lift our game. We're competitive by nature, so as a Management Team we're happy that Customer Radar are helping us improve all the time."
Natalie Ross-Murphy
Marketing Manager, Autosure
"Go for it. You won't regret it. This really is an inexpensive way to monitor customer satisfaction and experience. But I'd also say, it's not enough to just get the feedback and appreciate the increase in Google Reviews, it's when you extract and act on the insights the data provides that you really see the benefits, and so do your customers."
Natalie Ross-Murphy
Marketing Manager, Autosure
For Autosure, that data ultimately connects back to growth. A stronger customer experience doesn't just show up as a healthier score, it shows up in future business.
"Building the reputation of the Autosure product is really critical for our growth as a business. And if customers are happy with the experience that they've had, they're really likely to recommend it to others."
Natalie Ross-Murphy
Marketing Manager, Autosure
Beyond the headline metrics, the programme has reshaped how Autosure runs the business day to day. Comments feed directly into policy wording reviews and agent training, for example, ensuring agents clearly explain excess options at the point of sale. The dashboard's visuals are shared with the Board each month to track trends and prove out the impact of changes. And an unplanned benefit has emerged: comments are now shared in monthly team meetings and printed onto a board in the staff lunchroom, giving the team a direct, motivating view of the difference their work makes to real customers.
Autosure has also used its experience with the programme to position itself as a customer experience thought leader in its industry, contributing a monthly column to an industry publication, something Natalie credits to being an early mover among an agent network largely made up of smaller businesses.
Why It Keeps Compounding: SEO, GEO and the Rise of AI Search
The value of Autosure's review programme was never fixed to a single star rating, it compounds. A 4.6-star rating from over 3,000 reviews is already a strong trust signal in traditional Google search and the local map pack. But search behaviour has moved beyond a list of blue links. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar tools now answer questions like "is Autosure any good" or "best mechanical breakdown insurance NZ" by synthesising the volume, recency and sentiment of publicly available reviews and feedback. This is often called Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, the AI-era equivalent of SEO, where being recommended by an AI assistant depends less on keywords and more on being a business with a large, current, genuinely positive body of customer evidence behind it.
That's precisely the advantage Autosure has been quietly building since 2019. Six-plus years of continuous, authentic feedback, more than 45,000 survey responses and a review base that's grown from 165 to over 3,000, isn't something a competitor can replicate with a single review campaign. It's a depth and freshness of real customer evidence that both traditional search and AI-generated answers are increasingly built to reward. The longer Autosure keeps collecting it, the harder that advantage becomes for anyone else to close.
Autosure's Advice to Others
"Go for it. You won't regret it. This really is an inexpensive way to monitor customer satisfaction and experience. But I'd also say, it's not enough to just get the feedback and appreciate the increase in Google Reviews, it's when you extract and act on the insights the data provides that you really see the benefits, and so do your customers."
Natalie Ross-Murphy
Marketing Manager, Autosure
Capture, manage and amplify your reputation.
Quick links
CONTACT US
