AXA Belgium

AXA Belgium wanted to move from assumptions to evidence: how do people actually perceive and relate to insurance, what do different types of customers expect, and — crucially — how does AXA's own customer base compare to the wider Belgian market? We ran a research programme, qualitative and quantitative, to answer it and turn it into a targeting and retention strategy. It also fed directly into the customer experience work that followed — see the AXA car insurance CX case.

The engagement, at a glance:

• Qualitative — understand how people relate to insurance, and the behavioural archetypes behind it
• Quantitative — size those archetypes at AXA versus the total Belgian market
• Strategy — who to win (under-represented targets) and who to keep (over-represented, at-risk)

The challenge: know who your customers really are — and who you're missing

Insurance is a low-attention, low-love category — people relate to it at a distance and rarely research deeply. AXA wanted a clear, evidence-based read on the attitudes and expectations behind that behaviour, and on how its customer mix compared to the market as a whole. Not a report for the shelf — a base to decide where to invest in acquisition and where to defend against churn.

What we did: qualitative depth, quantitative proof

We combined two lenses, each doing what it does best:

• Qualitative research — to understand the real motivations, barriers and expectations people bring to insurance, and to define a set of behavioural archetypes: distinct profiles with different priorities, from those who just want simplicity and reassurance to those who want to personalise and compare everything
• Quantitative research — to size those archetypes: their weight within AXA's customer base, measured against their weight in the total Belgian market

That comparison is the pivot of the whole study. It turns “we think our customers are like X” into “here is exactly which profiles we over- and under-index on versus the market.”

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The deliverable: a targeting and retention strategy

From the sized segments, we defined where AXA should act:

• Who to win — profiles under-represented at AXA versus the market, with strategies to reach and acquire them
• Who to keep — profiles over-represented at AXA, with strategies to serve and retain them better and reduce churn
• What each profile needs — the expectations and experience elements that matter most to each, ready to brief into product, communication and experience decisions

Why it worked: research built to be used, not filed

The segmentation didn't stay a slide. Because we sized it against the market and translated it into clear acquisition and retention priorities, it became a decision tool — and it fed straight into the customer journey and experience work AXA ran next, giving that work a quantified picture of which profiles each journey was really serving. Right method for the question, conclusions the teams could act on.