Best home insurance provider: Rias

Focusing on understanding and serving the needs of a specific customer base is the secret of success for the Retirement Insurance Advisory Service (Rias), specialist provider of insurance products for the over-50s and winner for the second year running of the best home insurance provider category.

Part of Fortis, one of Europe's biggest insurance groups with total assets of over £700bn, Rias operates as an independent insurance broker negotiating rates and cover with a panel of insurers exclusively for the over-50s. Rias offers its own home contents and buildings insurance contracts and, depending on a customer's property details and particular insurance needs, finds the best premium from its panel of insurers which include Canopius, Legal & General, AXA, Link, Principal Choice, ACE, FamilyPlus and Fortis Group.

By concentrating on negotiating bulk deals purely for the over-50s - deemed as low-risk householders who take care of their properties and are more security conscious than younger age groups - Rias claims anyone switching to its home insurance contract is likely to cut their premiums by up to 35%.

"The over-50s market are a very savvy audience and are looking for true value for money and this is one of the major attractions of our policies," says operations director Oliver Shaw. "But it's not simply about saving money. It's also about having a quality product and the associated customer service back-up to go with this."

The company has developed comprehensive and straightforward buildings and contents policies offering a pretty standard range of cover. The standard contents policy benefits, for example, includes up to £50,000 new-for-old cover and standard accidental damage for contents, £2m personal liability and limited cover for high-risk property such as jewellery and works of art. Customers can choose to extend their policy to cover further accidental damage, personal belongings away from home, high-value high-risk possessions and pedal cycles.

All policyholders have access to a 24-hour legal and domestic advice line, which helps with processing claims speedily. But it's the optional extras that particularly reflect the target market. These include, garden insurance at £2 a month, caravan cover from £11 a month and home emergency cover at £4.99. Particularly appealing to many older people who perhaps live alone with no family nearby is the personal accident home help extra costing £1 a person a month. This pays out up to £50 in cash a week for eight weeks towards the cost of home help needed if a customer, say, breaks a leg.

The other half of the winning formula is providing a customer service geared to the needs of the over-50s market. "We are totally focused on tailoring the customer service experience to the requirements of this age group," Shaw says. "Without making assumptions about our customers, we know that they want easy to use services, and professional and courteous interactions with our staff."

Recognising its customers prefer to communicate by phone or mail, Rias has dedicated departments set up to handle this. No targets are set on call lengths, for example, so customers won't feel rushed through calls. And Rias has made a commitment to keep its call centres based in the UK. It has also made setting up a policy as easy as possible by reducing the paperwork required so that customers don't have to fill in any forms. Mr Shaw attributes a major part of Rias' success to having a highly trained workforce.

"This impacts directly on customer service not only by ensuring all staff are professionally equipped, but that they also are motivated and focused on delivering good service to the customer," he says. "As an example, we recently received a letter from a customer who said, 'I accepted the quote, not just because it was very competitive, but also because your employee was so courteous and professional in the way he dealt with my enquiry'."

The combination of a quality product at low cost plus good customer service has worked for Rias. It now has 750,000 customersand over the past year, has notched up a 37% growth in income and 44% growth in profit.

A high proportion of new customers come to Rias as a direct result of its advertising and direct mail campaigns. "And, increasingly, we've found that many customers hear about us through recommendations from our existing customers," Mr Shaw says. "Our vision is to be the over-50s customers' first choice for private home and motor insurance."