This paper examines the relationship between customer satisfaction and profitability at the level of the individual customer. In many industries, investigations detect a positive, decreasing relationship between customer satisfaction and firm profitability. The insurance industry has rarely been the object of such investigations. Pooser and Browne (2018) started this discussion by examining U.S. insurers at the firm level. We provide reasons why the positive satisfaction–profitability relationship might be reversed, particularly in the case of the insurance industry. We conduct an array of OLS regressions with customer-level data. Our results reveal a strong positive relationship between customer satisfaction and profitability. The effect is considerably large and also robust when investigating the effect of several customer characteristics on this relationship. We recommend that the increase in profitability is induced by a strong positive correlation between customer satisfaction and premium income, while satisfaction is not associated with the combined ratio.

本文在单个客户的层面上研究了客户满意度和盈利能力之间的关系。在许多行业，调查发现客户满意度和公司盈利能力之间存在积极的、递减的关系。保险业很少成为此类调查的对象。Pooser 和 Browne（2018 年）通过在公司层面检查美国保险公司来开始讨论。我们提供了为什么积极的满意度-盈利关系可能会逆转的原因，特别是在保险业的情况下。我们使用客户级别的数据进行一系列 OLS 回归。我们的结果显示客户满意度和盈利能力之间存在很强的正相关关系。在调查几个客户特征对这种关系的影响时，这种影响相当大而且很稳健。我们建议盈利能力的提高是由客户满意度和保费收入之间的强正相关引起的，而满意度与综合比率无关。