Image from carinsurancecritics.blogspot.com
We all recognize both Geico and State Farm for their ubiquitous commercials on national television. To the untrained eye absorbing these advertisements, these companies both seem to offer easy solutions to our insurance coverage at a low cost. However, upon closer inspection, we can see that underneath the marketing campaigns, consumers don’t always feel the same way, and they let their feelings known on social media — often right on the Facebook pages of the insurance companies.
Even though usually only the more extreme opinions would go so far as to rant about a company on social media, it is usually some projected fault of the company that would prompt such a reaction — meaning that the data should still be gleaned for insights as to what either company can do better. Let’s use Signals to sift through and compare feedback on these two insurance agencies, posted conveniently in public for all the world to see.
We ran both Geico’s and State Farm’s Facebook pages (crawled all posts and comments from Jan. 1, 2016 to now) through the Signals job, then used Signals’ unique “Compare” feature to see them both side by side. The results were quite stark.
State Farm Wins Customer Service by a Landslide
When it comes to customer service, the Facebook data shows that State Farm has better reviews than Geico — see Category Overview and Buzzword features below.
The Buzzword feature analyzes the most important words across every comment in the dataset. However, the feature is unique in the sense that we can also click on any of the terms to filter out the dataset to only those that contain the term — in this case, the word “Customer Service”. Hence the dominance of the term in the Buzzword widget.
When filtering out to “Customer Service”, we can see that the Facebook comments on Geico’s service are more negative than State Farm’s neutral responses. We can also see the customer perception linked to Geico in these areas: Publicly Irresponsible, Fraud Daylight, and Accident Forgiveness. Geico can utilize this feedback in examining its Customer Service processes, as well as processes in the claims department, to see if action plans can be generated to improve the customer experience.
Both Sides Need an Advertising Overhaul
No company is perfect, and some people like to rant in general. State Farm does have its share of constructive criticism. In the advertising depot, both companies could use a data-driven analysis of consumer feedback to generate ideas to improve ad effectiveness.
This is a sample of the kinds of messages State Farm receives for its advertising campaign depicting a cute dog. Of course, the messages mostly focus on the cuteness of the dog and the homely memories of childhood (which is good for State Farm’s “family-style” image), but one comment (third-from-top) remains problematic for State Farm. The commenter questions State Farm’s “mimicry” of Geico’s “lame” commercials. If the advertising department wants to distinguish the company from the competition, comments like these should make State Farm rethink their media strategy.
Geico’s commercials, on the other hand, are well-known and fuel a lot of its new customer growth. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Scrolling through, we found one of the comments make a negative reference to one of its commercials involving a chimpanzee. Curious, we typed in “chimpanzee” as a search term within the dataset.
27 comments involved the chimp advertisement (out of a total of 630), and the majority were highly negative, criticizing the use of a chimp actor for being cruel to the animal. In viewing this voice of the customer, Geico can become more socially aware of the context in which it is publishing its advertisements, and how it is being perceived by the customer.
Overall, the Facebook data we analyzed shows that Geico gets more negative complaints than State Farm in customer service and satisfaction, yet is still more widely visible and recognized than its competitor. Any insurance company, including Geico and State Farm, have their share of PR issues, and Facebook is just one source of input from customers who could rave about the service, or be disillusioned. With the powerful machine learning and augmented intelligence platform of Signals, we can decode hundreds of these comments in a matter of minutes, and transform both positive and negative feedback into actionable insights.
Contact clientservices@tasteanalytics.com and ask for a free trial account to try it for yourself.
