Prudential ranks among Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies, getting 3.84 out of 5 stars. Customers rated it highly for its customer service.
Nupur Gambhir is a content editor and licensed life, health, and disability insurance expert. She has extensive experience bringing brands to life and has built award-nominated campaigns for travel and tech. Her insurance expertise has been featured in Bloomberg News, Forbes Advisor, CNET, Fortune, Slate, Real Simple, Lifehacker, The Financial Gym, and the end-of-life planning service.
John is the editorial director for CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, John was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and had been an editor and reporter at a number of other media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance, and technology.
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Prudential ranked among Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies, earning 3.84 stars out of 5.
Prudential earns strong loyalty from customers surveyed by Insure.com, with most reporting they would renew their policy with the insurer. A majority of customers also reported that they were happy with the company’s customer service and ease of service.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
More than 77% of Prudential’s customers we surveyed gave the company high marks for customer service. In a separate J.D. Power study looking at customer satisfaction, the company had a score of 779, just below the life insurance industry average of 790.
Customers want a hassle-free insurance experience. When compared to other insurers surveyed, 75% of Prudential’s customers gave it high marks. Pacific Life led this category.
A wide range of policy offerings makes it easier for customers to get the coverage they need. Allstate led in this category, receiving a score of 85%.
Trust is a vital part of the relationship between an insurer and its policyholders. Sixty-eight percent of the company’s customers we surveyed said it was trustworthy. Penn Mutual led this category.
Happy customers are loyal customers. Almost all of Prudential’s customers plan to stick with the company. Most companies scored highly in this category. And 100% of the customers from four insurers, including Gerber Life and Lincoln Financial, said they would renew with their current company.
Prudential is a Fortune 500 company that provides insurance, retirement and investment products. It is the second-largest life insurance company in the U.S.
Founded in Newark, New Jersey, in 1875, Prudential has become one of the world’s largest financial services companies, with $1.35 trillion of assets under management.
Prudential focuses on insurance, investment and retirement income.
Sources:
Prudential. “Life Insurance Policies.” Accessed January 2024.
Prudential. “Financial Strength Ratings.” Accessed January 2024.
Prudential. “Annuity Strategies for Your Retirement Challenges.” Accessed January 2024.
Prudential. “Prudential History.” Accessed January 2024.
Prudential. “Prudential Financial Fact Sheet.” Accessed January 2024.
J.D. Power. “Individual Life Insurance Study.” Accessed January 2024.
S&P Global. “The world’s largest life insurers, 2023.” Accessed January 2024.
Insure.com in the fall of 2023 surveyed more than 1,750 people with auto, home, life and health insurance (1003 with life 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 Life 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.
In addition, the editors also created star rankings for each company. Respondents were asked to pick their insurer’s top three attributes out of the more than the dozen presented – again including categories such as customer satisfaction and policy offerings. The number of responses for each of those attributes was totaled and then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create the star ranking.
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. The editors identified the NAIC company code or codes that were the primary underwriting companies for each carrier and line of business using total annual premiums. The associated NAIC complaint index score was used in our calculations. If more than one underwriting company was identified for a line, we used a weighted average of the NAIC complaint index scores.
The team also gathered AM Best data, which measures financial strength.
They also collected insurance rate data from Quadrant Information Services (for auto and home insurance), Compulife (for life insurance) and the public health marketplace (for health insurance).
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 life insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
To find the industry average annual premium, insure.com weighed the rates from 9 companies: AAA, Farmers, Guardian Life, John Hancock, Lincoln Financial, MassMutual, New York Life, Northwestern Mutual and Transamerica. Rates are based on premiums for 35-year-old males and females who are non-smokers and in good health. Rates are for a 20-year-term policy that provides $500,000 in coverage.
No insurer in our ranking received less than half a star and the highest possible ranking is 5 stars.
On company review pages, the editors compared the profiled insurers in various categories against the leaders in that category or against other top insurers that match up well against the profiled company in terms of size and/or coverage area.