Customer Impact

At Guardian Financial Services, we're committed to the Association of British Insurers' (ABI's) Customer Impact scheme.

Customer impact - meeting the customers' needs by putting them at the heart of our industry

This is a voluntary scheme which aims to improve customers' experience of the life, pensions and investments industry. It's overseen by an independent Customer Impact panel.

Customer Impact commitments

As a member of Customer Impact, we commit to:

  • providing clear information and good service
  • maintaining an appropriate and effective relationship with you

We see these commitments as the absolute minimum we should be doing for our customers and it's our ambition to do much more than this.

Yearly report - a word from our Chief Executive

Otto Thoresen

Welcome to our yearly report, which we put together to give you an open and honest update on our progress.

In it you’ll find details of:

  • our performance against our customer priorities
  • our 2009 highlights
  • our thoughts about the coming year

We’re always working hard to improve and as well as highlighting what we’ve done well, we’re equally honest about any areas where we need to do better. We’re disappointed that this report shows that there are some areas where we need to improve and we’ll be reviewing our procedures accordingly.

In addition, we’ve extended the figures to show how we compared against the industry averages. However, because Guardian has been closed to new business for some years, our mix of products and customers is different from many other providers. This can influence our survey results in different ways at different times.

To make sure we’re best placed to meet the challenges of the future, this year, we’ve made some operational changes. These include appointing a new Chief Operating Officer for life and pensions who has overall responsibility for all aspects of our business operations, including customer services. This will help us work together with a consistent approach to improve the service and customer experience we provide.

We’ve also appointed a new Chief Risk Officer, as especially in today’s fast-changing world, effective risk management is vital to ensuring we’re in the best possible position to face the future.

We welcome any comments you have about this report or AEGON in general – please email customer@aegon.co.uk

Otto Thoresen
Chief Executive, AEGON UK
June 2010

Read the full report (PDF)