Algeria AgencyIndustries
Insurance: you are judged on the day of the claim, not the day of the sale
Your product is invisible for years and then assessed once, on the worst day your customer has had. Everything follows from that.
Insurance is the only product in this series bought in the hope of never using it. It cannot be seen, touched or compared in use — and for years the only evidence it exists is a payment and a certificate.
Then one day it is used, once, in circumstances where your customer is already upset: a damaged vehicle, a water leak, a theft. That day, and only that day, is when your work of the previous five years gets assessed.
That lag explains nearly everything the sector is blamed for. The contract nobody read, the exclusion discovered at the worst moment, the delay that feels endless: those are not service accidents, they are the predictable consequences of a product sold at one moment and judged at another.
So this article treats the sale as preparation for the claim. It starts with what the legal obligation did to your customers, goes on to the mechanics of the misunderstanding, and ends with what we refuse to write on your behalf.
You sell something that goes unused and is judged once
A restaurant is judged at every meal, a garage at every job, a shop at every parcel. An insurer is judged once, possibly never, and the rest of the time it exists for its customer only as an instalment falling due.
The consequence is brutal: you do not accumulate credit as the years pass. Five years of cover without incident produce no positive memory, because nothing happened and there is nothing to remember.
The corollary is that your entire reputation is built on a very small number of interactions, nearly all of them lived through at an unpleasant moment. An ordinary trade has a thousand chances to recover from a bad impression; you have one.
It is also what makes this sector’s communication so hard to get right. There is nothing to show, nothing to photograph, no demonstration possible — and the void is nearly always filled with general promises nobody believes and nothing verifies.
What remains, and it is the subject of this whole article, is preparation. What the customer knows beforehand, what they understood of what they signed, and what they know to do on the day something happens. All three are decided at the sale and paid for at the claim.
The legal obligation made a customer who complies rather than chooses
A large part of the market consists of policies bought because the customer has to. They are not buying protection, they are buying the right to drive, to rent, to trade — and they experience it as an administrative formality rather than a service.
That produces a very particular behaviour the sector misreads: this customer looks for the cheapest and quickest option, not because they are indifferent to quality, but because they have no reason to believe quality varies. Nothing they are shown lets them judge it.
The fault is not theirs. Policies are written in language that does not permit comparison, cover types carry neighbouring names that do not cover the same things, and the only legible number across every proposal is the price.
The commercial consequence is direct: as long as price is the only legible dimension, it is the only one you will be compared on, and you will lose to cheaper for as long as you fail to make another dimension visible.
Making another dimension visible is not a stylistic exercise. It is writing down what a cover type actually covers, with a concrete example, and writing what it does not cover with equal care. The second is what nobody does, and it is what distinguishes.
The mechanics of the misunderstanding: exclusions
Nearly every dispute in this sector has the same shape: the customer believed they were covered, they were not, and the clause saying so did exist in a document they signed without reading.
It is tempting to conclude that they should have read it. That is true and useless: nobody reads twenty pages of terms at a counter, and a sector building its operation on the opposite assumption has built on sand.
The useful fix is not legal, it is editorial. For each common cover type, write three lines in ordinary language: what is covered, what is not, and the commonest example of the second category. Three lines, not three pages.
The quality test for those three lines is simple: if a customer who has read them can still be surprised on the day of a claim, they are badly written. This is not about covering everything, it is about covering what actually produces disputes, and your claims handlers know exactly what that is.
One point insurers avoid and that pays: the notification windows and the excesses. Those are the two pieces of information that turn a theoretical cover into a concrete commitment, and hiding them until signature only moves the disappointment to a more expensive moment.
What the customer looks for before buying
They look first for the price, and you have to give it or say honestly why you cannot. A rate that depends on personal parameters cannot be published as a firm price; the parameters that make it vary can be, and writing them beats silence.
Next they look for the documents required. It is exactly the banking problem: an exact list, saying what must be an original, prevents a wasted journey and a purchase abandoned halfway.
They want to know what happens if they change vehicle, home, trade or circumstances. Those events are frequent, they worry people, and the absence of a written answer pushes them to report nothing — which produces precisely the dispute you want to avoid.
Finally they look for what they will have to do on the day of a claim. It is the most useful information in the whole sector and the least often brought forward, even though it is the only thing that shows what your service looks like in the one moment it counts.
A note on method: those four questions are the ones your agents hear every day. The most reliable way to build a useful page is to ask them for the list, not to imagine what a customer might want to know.
The claim: where everything gets lost
A claim is the only moment your customer watches you work, and it is nearly always the worst-organised moment of the relationship.
The first problem is the notification window. It exists, it is short for some cover types, and it is nearly always discovered after the fact. Publishing it in the same place as the cover itself is a free correction that prevents refusals that are legitimate and avoidable.
The second is the list of documents to assemble, which varies with the nature of the claim and is almost never published case by case. A customer who learns on the third call that they need one more document loses confidence in the rest of the process.
The third is silence during assessment. A file moving forward without news is experienced as a forgotten file, and the gap between the two is closed by a thirty-second call with no new information to announce.
The fourth is vocabulary. Assessment, depreciation, excess, recovery, ceiling: words your trade uses precisely and a customer understands approximately. Each deserves a sentence of explanation where it first appears.
What can be measured, and what we will not quantify
Three measures are enough and they are taken in your branch without tools. The first is the share of files complete at first notification. It is the exact equivalent of the banking indicator and it points straight at what is missing from your pages.
The second is the number of incoming calls whose only purpose is "where has my claim got to". That figure is a thermometer for your internal communication, and it falls the moment a progress note is sent without being asked for.
The third is the question most often asked before purchase. Recorded for a fortnight by your agents, it identifies the sentence missing from your pricing page, and there are almost never more than three candidates.
What we will not give you: an average settlement time, a refusal rate or an insurance penetration rate "observed in Algeria". We know of no dated, checkable source for any of the three, and we will not substitute an estimate that would merely look serious.
It is a position we hold across this whole series, and it matters particularly here: in a sector where the customer can verify nothing, an agency inventing figures for you manufactures exactly the problem your trade spends its time repairing.
Where people look for you, and on which screen
An insurance search happens in two very different contexts, and your pages have to serve both. The first is calm: somebody comparing before a renewal date. The second is not calm at all: somebody who has just had an accident and is looking for what to do.
The internet market observatory published by ARPCE counts, for the second quarter of 2025, some 59.10 million internet subscriptions in Algeria, of which 88.71% are mobile and 11.29% fixed.
The second context dictates the form of everything else. The claims number has to be callable in one gesture, the steps have to fit on one screen, and the document list has to be readable and copyable — because it will be read standing up, at the side of a road, by somebody in no state to navigate a menu.
The first context demands something else: comparison. Cover types, principal exclusions and excesses have to be readable side by side, without a horizontally scrolling table, on a six-inch screen. It is a layout constraint that decides a sale.
And one consequence common to both: the branch address and its real hours. Mundane, free, and wrong in a surprising share of cases — including for branches that have moved.
- Mobile subscriptions88.71%
- Fixed subscriptions11.29%
ARPCE, internet market observatory, second quarter of 2025
What you are not allowed to promise
This sector is regulated, and the regulation bears on anything resembling a promise of settlement. It is the first thing a supplier has to know before writing a single line for you.
Not promisable: acceptance of a claim, an amount, a settlement time, or any wording implying a loss will be covered without the policy and the circumstances having been examined.
Also not to be done, even without a formal prohibition: named comparisons with a competitor, and the exploitation of fear. The second deserves naming, because it is this trade’s standing temptation — insurance is sold against a risk, and it is easy to slide from information into alarm.
The line is nonetheless clear. Describing a risk with verifiable facts is information; suggesting it is imminent, or that a decision has to be taken today, is a manipulation that will produce a cancellation within the year and a bad review with it.
We are neither lawyers nor compliance. We describe cautious, stable principles; for your company your compliance function is the authority, and we would rather build our schedules around its approval loop than around it.
Reviews, written by people who have just had a loss
Your public reviews are harsh and structurally biased: they are written almost entirely by people who have just been through a loss and a procedure, and never by the thousands of others whose year passed without incident.
That does not make them wrong. It means they do not measure what people think: they measure the quality of your claims handling, not of your product, and those are two things you steer separately.
The reply constraint is the same as in banking and it is absolute: an individual file is not discussed on a public page. You do not confirm somebody is insured, you do not comment on a refusal, you do not explain an exclusion applied to their case.
The tenable reply is short: restate that the case cannot be handled here, give the exact complaints channel with its response time, and stand by it. A reply pointing at a channel that goes nowhere is worse than no reply at all.
There is finally one moment when asking for a review is legitimate and nobody does it: after a claim has been settled. It is the only point in the cycle where a customer holds a verifiable positive experience of your trade, and it is invariably allowed to pass.
Payment, renewal and the certificate
Renewal is this sector’s silent leak. A policy expiring while the customer is busy elsewhere is not a commercial decision, it is an oversight — and it should be treated as an oversight rather than as an objection.
The reminder before the due date is therefore the most profitable message you can send, and it has to contain three things: the exact date, the amount, and what to do. A reminder that merely invites somebody to "call in at the branch" adds a step instead of removing one.
Online payment, in this sector, is not about modernising an image. It is about making renewal possible without travelling, which is exactly the friction losing you policies held by customers who had no intention of leaving.
The direction of the market is clear and dated: over one year the number of online merchants grew 26%, card transactions on the internet 38%, and the amount paid online 179%, while the card base grew only 9%.
Read it as a trend rather than an instruction. The useful starting point is more modest: make the certificate obtainable without travelling, and make the renewal reminder automatic. Those two need no rebuild and retain more policies than a campaign.
GIE Monétique, 2025 annual balance sheet
What to check before signing with a supplier
The first question is compliance: ask what they will refuse to write. A supplier proposing promises of acceptance, guaranteed settlement times or hooks that play on fear has not met your framework and will expose you.
The second is the approval loop: will they accept every text passing through your compliance function, and does their schedule allow for it? A supplier promising a cadence incompatible with your loop is really promising to bypass it.
The third is data. A quotation form collects an address, a vehicle, sometimes a family or professional situation — which is enough to build a profile. Ask where it is hosted, what is retained, and for how long.
The fourth is maintenance: who checks that the cover types described still match the policies being sold, and how often? A page describing cover that changed two years ago is a dispute in preparation.
The fifth is a test: ask them to write the three lines of a common cover type — covered, not covered, example. You will see immediately whether they can write an exclusion without drowning it, which is the only competence that really matters here.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
What we will refuse: any wording promising acceptance, an amount or a settlement time, any named comparison with a competitor, and any hook built on fear of an event. We will refuse even if a competitor does it, because that is what manufactures next year’s cancellations.
A limit of competence, stated plainly: we are neither lawyers nor compliance, and we do not certify that your communications meet regulation. We know what is plainly to be avoided; your compliance function decides, and we work with its calendar.
We will also refuse to summarise a cover type without a handler at your company having read and accepted the summary. An editorial shortcut on an exclusion is not a stylistic slip, it is a dispute you will carry and we will not.
What we do: three lines per common cover type — covered, not covered, example — the document list by type of claim, the notification window written beside the cover it applies to, a set of steps that fits on a phone screen, and a renewal reminder giving the date, the amount and the action.
And what you should do without us this week: ask your claims handlers which three exclusions produce the most disputes. They will answer in a minute. Those three deserve three lines each on your site, and writing them costs nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Can we show a price online?
A rate depending on personal parameters cannot be published as a firm price. What can be published, and almost nobody writes, is the parameters that make it vary — more useful than silence and more honest than a headline price.
How do we reduce disputes about exclusions?
Three lines per common cover type: what is covered, what is not, and the commonest example of the second. Your handlers know exactly which exclusions produce the disputes — ask them for the list.
Should we publish notification windows?
Yes, and beside the cover they apply to rather than in a separate document. A window discovered after the fact produces a refusal that is legitimate and avoidable, which is the worst possible combination for your reputation.
How do we reply to a review written after a claim?
Without confirming the person is insured and without commenting on the file. Restate that the case cannot be handled on a public page, give the exact complaints channel and its response time, and make sure that channel goes somewhere.
What is the average settlement time in Algeria?
We do not know, and we know of no dated, checkable source for it. Measure your own by type of claim, and be wary of a supplier quoting that figure with no year and no publisher.
When should we ask a customer for a review?
After a claim has been settled. It is the only point in the cycle where somebody holds a verifiable positive experience of your trade, and it is the one the whole sector lets pass.
Where we come in
Your claims handlers know the three exclusions that produce the most disputes. Nobody has asked them, and none of what they know is written down.
- We write three lines per cover: included, excluded, an example.
- We have every line read back by somebody who handles the files.
- We list the documents expected in the policyholder’s vocabulary.
Cover, amount, timescale: no sentence promising them will come from here, because law and compliance are not our trades.
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