Liberty Mutual is a notable company for home insurance from Insure.com’s 2023 Best Insurance Companies survey and top for claims service.
Maggie has twenty years of experience working in media. She is a writer and editor on car insurance and related issues. Before joining Insure.com, she reported on health, education and lifestyle for magazines, websites and newspapers in Nevada.
Leslie Kasperowicz is an insurance educator and content creation professional with nearly two decades of experience first directly in the insurance industry at Farmers Insurance and then as a writer, researcher, and educator for insurance shoppers writing for sites like ExpertInsuranceReviews.com and InsuranceHotline.com and managing content, now at Insurance.com.
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Liberty Mutual is one of the notable picks in Insure.com’s 2023 Best Insurance Companies survey for home insurers.
Liberty Mutual, in Insure.com’s survey of insurance consumers, scored highly for trustworthiness, with 81% saying they trust the company. Respondents also liked the company’s claim service and discounts, which includes a paperless policy discount. Liberty Mutual did not have the highest score for customer service, but 83% of customers are satisfied overall. And the company had a consistently solid performance in most categories.
However, rates are a key part of how Insure.com’s home insurance ratings are calculated. Liberty Mutual doesn’t supply rates to our third-party data source, Quadrant, so the editors can’t compare it on cost. However, Liberty Mutual is a major home insurance company and remains one of our editors’ notable picks. With an A rating from AM Best, it’s a company with a good financial standing as well.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics, including two J.D. Power studies (Home Insurance Study and Property Claims Satisfaction Study) and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
The majority of Liberty Mutual customers surveyed rated it highly for customer service, but a number of competitors did better in this category. State Farm had the highest score.
J.D. Power’s 2022 Home Insurance Study of overall customer satisfaction gave Liberty Mutual an 805 out of 1,000. That’s just below the average of 819.
Liberty Mutual had a middle-of-the-road score for policy offerings for home insurance. About half of all home insurance providers performed higher, and about half of them rated lower. Customers rated Liberty Mutual higher in other areas, but this was not one of the company’s best categories. Travelers led this category.
When it comes to ease of service – accessing policy documents and services – Liberty Mutual’s score was 81%, which puts it in good company. Most companies scored in the 80s for this category, but Travelers won.
Liberty Mutual customers would recommend the company to others at a rate of 81%. Most companies had scores in the 80th-90th percentiles. State Farm led this category, with 97% of its customers saying they’d recommend the insurer to others.
Liberty Mutual has gained the trust of its customers, with 81% of respondents indicating that the company is trustworthy. This was higher than the ratings for most other insurance providers and tied with Travelers. Liberty Mutual wasn’t far behind State Farm, which led this category.
Liberty Mutual’s customers like the company well enough that 85% of those participating in Insure.com’s 2023 survey said they plan to renew. While more current Travelers customers said they plan to renew, Liberty Mutual still had a strong response from its customers.
Liberty Mutual customers reported the highest satisfaction for claim service in the survey. According to our survey results, 98% of customers reported satisfaction with how claims are handled by Liberty Mutual. The industry average claims satisfaction rating from J.D. Power is 871, and Liberty Mutual exceeded that score.
Discounts for bundling home with auto wasn’t a top category for Liberty Mutual. Several other companies did better in this category, but few did especially well here. Safeco, a Liberty subsidiary, had the highest score in our survey but also isn’t ranked.
Discounts is another category in which Liberty Mutual had a strong performance, earning one of the highest scores. Liberty Mutual does a great job on discounts, according to survey respondents. Auto-Owners won this category.
Founded in 1912, Liberty Mutual’s first home office was in Boston. The company offers home, auto, property, business and life insurance. Safeco Corporation joined Liberty Mutual’s family in 2008. More recently, Liberty Mutual launched its Solaria Labs to promote innovation and progress.
“Only pay for what you need” is the catchy slogan of Liberty Mutual, the sixth-largest casualty and property insurer nationwide. The company was ranked among 100 “Companies that Care” by PEOPLE magazine in 2022.
Sources:
Liberty Mutual. “ Home Insurance Discounts.” Accessed December 2022.
Liberty Mutual. “Liberty Mutual at a Glance.” Accessed December 2022.
Liberty Mutual. “Shop Insurance.” Accessed December 2022.
J.D. Power. “2022 U.S. Property Claims Satisfaction Study.” Accessed December 2022
J.D. Power. “ 2022 U.S. Home Insurance Study.” Accessed December 2022
Insure.com in the fall of 2022 surveyed more than 1,500 people with auto, home, life and health insurance (805 with home insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR. Respondents were asked to name their insurer and the editors then selected – based on the number of responses – the top companies for this year’s Best home Insurance Companies ranking. Insure.com needed 20 or more of a company’s customers to respond to the survey for that insurer to be included in the ranking, although in some categories the editors did consider companies with 18 or 19 responses.
Respondents were first asked to grade their insurer in the following categories – customer satisfaction, claims satisfaction and policy offerings. The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
Survey score calculation. Respondents were then asked to rank their insurer’s top three attributes out of more than a dozen presented – including customer satisfaction and policy offerings. For a number one choice, five points were given; for a second choice, three points; and for a third choice, a single point. The total points for each choice – first, second and third – were then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create a percentage. Those percentages are presented in the results as scores.
Respondents were then asked if they would recommend their insurer to someone else. The percentage who said yes is presented in the results.
They also were given the statement “I trust my insurance company” and asked if they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. The percentage of those who said they agreed or strongly agreed is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then collected National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ complaint data, which ranks a company by the number of customer complaints it receives, and A.M. Best data, which measures financial strength.
They also collected insurance rate data from Quadrant Information Services.
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., managing director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For home insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
No company in the ranking received less than 1 star in any category and 5 stars was the most any insurer could receive.